DNA Evidence Reveals Another Wrongful Conviction

By Chuck Sudo in News on Aug 31, 2012 8:40PM

Aprentiss Nash has reason to celebrate this Labor Day. Nash received news Thursday that his 1997 conviction for armed robbery and murder was vacated and he was released from the Menard Correctional Center this morning.

Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez’s office asked a judge to vacate Nash’s conviction after Alvarez’s new Conviction Integrity Unit determined, based on DNA evidence and a review of police and court records, that he was innocent of the 1995 robbery and murder of Leon Stroud in West Pullman.

“Based upon the new DNA evidence and the collective results of our investigation, it is my assessment that we do not have the evidence that is required to sustain this murder charge,” said Alvarez, who established the six-person unit solely to investigate wrongful conviction claims.

Nash has proclaimed his innocence from the moment he was arrested. He was convicted based on discredited eyewitness accounts and sentenced to 80 years in prison. The killer wore a black ski mask at the time of the crime and Nash, acting as his own attorney on an appeal, had a request for DNA testing of the mask rejected and dismissed by Alvarez’s office and an appeals court. The Illinois Appellate Court reversed that decision and testing revealed the profile of a prison inmate who was paroled within the last year.

The vacating of Nash’s conviction also serves as a reminder of the high rate of exonerations in Illinois. The National Registry of Exonerations released a report in June that showed 101 former prison inmates in Illinois had their convictions exonerated. Seventy-eight of those convictions came from Cook County, which outpaced every state in the nation except Texas, California and New York.