Nancy Smith is a former Head Start bus driver from Lorain, Ohio, who was arrested and falsely charged with sexually abusing children in her care in 1994.
She served more than 15 years in prison for crimes that never took place.
WYSO Community Voices Producer Mary Evans asked Smith what advice she would give to people in a similar situation. Excerpts from that conversation are below.
The following transcript is lightly edited for length and clarity.
Nancy Smith: I am a mother of four, a grandmother of nine, and a great-grandmother of two, and I am getting ready to have a third one.
I am an exoneree. I was falsely incarcerated back in 1994.
I was exonerated in 2009, but it was taken away. Then, in February of '24, I had another one, and that was my final exoneration.
Mary Evans: Could you give us a brief breakdown of the crime you were charged with and what that entails?
Smith: So I was a bus driver for the Head Start program in Lorain going into my fourth year. I had a mother make an allegation against me, saying that I took her daughter to a birthday party where I molested this child with my boyfriend...I was like, 'Are you kidding me? This is what you're talking about, you know? The next thing I know, she went to other parents and said that this happened to her daughter and that they needed to take their children to the hospital to be checked...blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so what happened was they went to the hospital, and they were like, there's no signs of abuse on these children.
I thought we had a fair justice system until this nightmare happened to me.Nancy Smith
A police detective interviewed me. I took a polygraph test, and I passed. It was no problem because nothing ever occurred anyway. But this mother was not going to stop. She went to the mayor, to the TV station, to the newspapers, and turned this into a big hysteria.
Evans: What kind of perception of the judicial system did you have growing up?
Smith: I thought we had a fair justice system until this nightmare happened to me. And then I realized that you know what? We don't have a fair justice system. And the sad thing is that my children, you know, grew up through all this nightmare also. And so they don't trust the justice system to this day.
And I really don't know if I can ever trust them again. They have, for 30 years, put me through a nightmare. And, you know, I mean, I only spent 15 years in prison. But, you know, these last 15 years, they really put me through some things. And so it's hard to trust the justice system. And I probably never will.
And that's really sad because we're raised to know that they are there and that they're going to do the right thing and that they're going to, you know, protect their citizens. And even the police department failed me in so many ways. It's really hard to even trust them.
Evans: If there was one thing that you could say to someone fighting for their innocence, and they feel like giving up. What would you tell them?
Smith: You can't...You can never lose faith. You can never lose hope. You know, there was a time when I thought I would never go home. I'm doing 30 to 90 years. I'm never going to go home. But I never gave up my faith because I knew that, you know, this was man's time. This was not God's time. And there were times when I thought He was not with me. You know. Where are you? You're not with me. Why are you letting me go through this? [voice breaks].
You gotta hang in there. You've got to be strong. You have to...that is one of the things that got me through prison, my faith.
Support for ReEntry Stories comes from The Montgomery County Office of Reentry and the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices at WYSO.
