Stephen Nodine, once seen as one of Mobile’s rising political figures, walked out of the Baldwin County Corrections Center in Bay Minette after serving two years behind bars, closing a chapter that began with the death of his girlfriend four years earlier and ended with guilty pleas rather than the murder conviction prosecutors initially sought.
Nodine, then 51, had been serving time on perjury, harassment and ethics violation charges tied to the investigation into the 2010 death of Angel Downs, 45, of Gulf Shores. Downs died of a gunshot wound in the driveway of her home, and whether her death was a homicide or a suicide became the central, unresolved question of Nodine’s 2010 murder trial. He was arrested on a murder charge but was never convicted of it; jurors deadlocked on both the murder count and an accompanying stalking charge, resulting in a mistrial on those counts. Prosecutors ultimately agreed to drop the murder and stalking charges in exchange for guilty pleas to perjury and harassment, while Nodine was separately convicted at trial of an ethics violation connected to his use of a county-issued pickup truck.
A judge sentenced Nodine in October 2012 to two years of a 10-year sentence on the perjury count, along with two concurrent one-year sentences on the harassment and ethics charges. The perjury charge stemmed from a claim Nodine made that he could not afford an attorney, while the harassment charge related to his conduct toward Downs before her death.
Nodine spent part of his sentence in a work-release program that allowed him to leave jail to work at his attorney’s office before returning each night, but Baldwin County Sheriff Huey “Hoss” Mack said Nodine was removed from that program for violating its rules, including being spotted at a location serving alcohol and later showing up at a golf course with no legitimate reason to be there. Mack said Nodine had otherwise been a model inmate since being pulled from work release.
Before his legal troubles began, Nodine had built a notable political career in Mobile, unseating a two-term incumbent to win a Mobile City Council seat in 2001 before winning election to the Mobile County Commission in 2004 and again in 2008. His decline started in 2009, when a small amount of marijuana was found in his county vehicle, leading to a 2011 guilty plea on a misdemeanor drug charge and a suspended sentence. He resigned from the County Commission in May 2010, just three days after his arrest in Downs’ death, and later pleaded guilty to a separate federal charge of being an unlawful drug user in possession of firearms, tied to handguns he gave to two county attorneys who checked on him the day after Downs died. That federal case brought a 15-month prison term served separately from his state sentence.
Nodine’s attorney, Pascal Bruijn, said his client has continued to maintain his innocence in Downs’ death and believes he was treated unjustly by the legal system, and Bruijn predicted Nodine would keep speaking publicly about the case after his release. Sheriff Mack, whose office investigated Downs’ death, said he expected much the same, noting that Nodine has never shied away from discussing what happened.