Last week's dramatic story about the exoneration of a man wrongly imprisoned for 18 years on rape charges included an interview with the woman who had accused him, incorrectly, of the crime.

He was named in the story. She was not.

Recently discovered DNA evidence proved that Dwayne Dail was not the rapist, as he had maintained since he was convicted in 1989. Dail was convicted largely on the testimony of the accuser, who was 12 at the time.

In the interview, the accuser, now 32, said she still worries that Dail was the one who raped her. "If it's not him, well, I guess I've been living like I'm safe because the DNA says it's not him," she said.

The N&O did not identify the woman, because, as the story said, the paper "does not typically identify people who say they have been sexually abused."

The story inevitably brought comparisons with the Duke lacrosse case, in which the three Duke players were declared innocent in April by the state attorney general. The paper had not named the accuser in more than a year's worth of stories, in keeping with its policy, but it did so as soon as the students were cleared.

So what's the difference in the Dail case? Why does the paper continue to protect the identity of his accuser after her identification of him was proved wrong?

Different circumstances, say N&O editors. In the Duke case, the attorney general's investigation determined that no assault occurred. The N&O cited that fact and other unique circumstances of the case in deciding to publish the Duke accuser's name.

There appears to be no dispute that Dail's accuser was raped those 20 years ago -- just not by him. The investigation into the case has been re-opened, and the reasons for not identifying a sex crime complainant remain -- sparing her public stigma, encouraging her to bring charges, and, perhaps in this case, protecting her from the real assailant. If the paper had named her, I can imagine the torrent of complaints I would have received from readers.

Yet -- is it fair for the paper to allow an unnamed person to continue to make accusations about a person whose name has been made public? Especially when he's just been cleared in court.

John Drescher, The N&O's managing editor, said editors did discuss whether to publish her quote. He said the paper had three choices:

1) Don't include the quote in the story.

2) Use the quote, but not name her.

3) Use the quote, and name her.

Identifying the woman, Drescher said, "I didn't feel to be an acceptable alternative, given the evidence that a sexual assault occurred."

But Drescher said he thought the paper owed it to readers to inform them how the accuser reacted to Dail's exoneration.

This is another of those tricky ethical balancing acts in journalism, weighing competing values. Which is more important: Fully informing readers about the facts of a case -- so they can form their own conclusions -- or treating accused and accuser equally in putting their names before the public?

Drescher said he leans to full disclosure of information to readers. The brief interview with the accuser in the story was more than offset by the scientific evidence and court testimony showing Dail's innocence, he said. "Given the scientific evidence showing that he was cleared, if you read the story from beginning to end, it is fair to him," he said.

I put myself in the shoes of Dail, who already has been wronged by 18 years of imprisonment based on the apparently incorrect identification. Allowing the woman to continue to question his innocence on an anonymous basis compounds the injury.

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