Jeff Ward '09When Dwayne Dail gained his freedom in August 2007, students in Duke Law's Wrongful Convictions course and Innocence Project had reason to celebrate. Over a six-year period, Duke Law students had worked with the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence and Innocence Projects around the state to gain Dail's release.
Dail's conviction for the 1989 rape of a 12-year-old girl was set aside by a Wayne County superior court judge after newly discovered DNA evidence cleared him of the crime. Dail had served more than 18 years in prison.
"Cases like this one give hope not only to those who have suffered the injustice of a wrongful conviction, but also to their allies, including all the students who toil relentlessly for another's freedom," said Jeff Ward '09, president of the student-run Innocence Project and a student in the Wrongful Convictions Clinic. "There are students who have stuck beside an inmate all throughout law school and long after, never giving up hope the inmate's story will end like Dwayne Dail's. It's easy to lose hope when you encounter the hundredth dead end. So Mr. Dail's exoneration serves to reinvigorate all of us.
"I also think his case and the media attention it receives can serve to push North Carolina law in the right direction," Ward added. "When people see that the theft of 18 years of Mr. Dail's freedom could have been avoided by simple improvements to the rules that regulate preservation of evidence, I hope they will support legislative changes that accomplish these and similar ends."
In some cases, wrongful convictions are the result of a disregard for rules or sloppy investigative work. During his semester in the Wrongful Convictions Clinic, Kyle Pousson '08 worked on a case involving a high-speed auto chase that ended in the death of one of the fleeing car's occupants. The other occupant was convicted of second-degree murder after he was determined to have been behind the wheel when the accident occurred. However, he maintained during his trial and afterward that his girlfriend - the victim - was actually the person driving.
Pousson worked with a team to pursue multiple avenues for investigating the man's claim of innocence: they found and digitally analyzed video of the accident taken from the police car; met with accident reconstructionists to try to recreate the accident; and attempted to track down the truck that was in the accident to see if forensic evidence might prove conclusive. Although these efforts did not uncover new evidence that would exonerate his client, Pousson said the experience had a lasting effect on him.
"I want to be a prosecutor," Pousson said. "This gave me a perspective from the other side, a greater appreciation of the human aspect of the law. It also helped me see what kinds of evidence you should insist on before prosecuting a case. We tracked down a lot of different threads in this case - all of which should have been done in the first place."