Dwayne Dail, a Goldsboro man who spent half his life in prison for another man's crime, has filed a lawsuit against the city of Goldsboro and several of its officials for mistakes he said led to his wrongful conviction and imprisonment.
The lawsuit alleges acts of negligence by Goldsboro officials, namely police officers and leaders who did not disclose the existence of evidence for more than 15 years.
Dail was exonerated in August 2007 after DNA tests on a semen stain from a piece of long-forgotten evidence proved the truth that Dail had insisted upon all along: Another man, not he, had raped the 12-year-old girl in 1987.
This past spring, the real rapist, William Neal, was convicted of rape and will spend the rest of his life in prison. That same piece of evidence, the little girl's nightgown, sealed Neal's fate.
In the lawsuit, attorneys detail Dail's crusade to find evidence in his case and perform DNA tests once that technology became available.
An attorney for Dail sent a letter to Goldsboro officials in 1995 asking that evidence in his case be DNA-tested. Those capabilities didn't exist when Dail was first convicted in 1989.
Dail's attorney was told that the evidence, namely the rape kit, had been destroyed in 1994. All the while, other evidence in the case was being held in the Goldsboro Police Department.
It would take more than a decade before lawyers with the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence persuaded a Goldsboro police officer to look further for evidence. The child's nightgown and bedsheets were in the police storage room.
Dail has struggled in freedom. He moved to Florida after his release. He has had trouble keeping a job because of the trauma he endured. He has spent much of the $750,000 he received in compensation from the state.
In April, Dail met the woman who had accused him of rape as a child. She and Dail have now become friends.
This past summer, Dail moved back to North Carolina and hopes to begin again.
"Dwayne will never really recover from what happened to him in prison," said Spencer Parris, a civil attorney in Raleigh who is representing Dail in the lawsuit. "No one should have to live through what he did."
