$7.52 Million Settlement After DNA Cleared Man Who Spent 18 Years in Prison for a Crime He Did Not Commit
Won by Martin & Jones.
E. Spencer Parris and G. Christopher Olson of Martin and Jones secured a $7.52 million settlement for Dwayne Allen Dail, who spent 18 years in a North Carolina prison before DNA evidence identified the actual perpetrator and cleared his name.
What happened
In 1989, Dwayne Allen Dail was 20 years old when a Wayne County jury convicted him of raping a 12-year-old girl in Goldsboro, North Carolina. The prosecution rested largely on two pieces of evidence that later science would discredit: a cross-racial eyewitness identification made six weeks after the crime, and hair microscopy analysis presented as placing Dail at the scene. He received two life sentences plus 18 years.
For years, Dail and his family sought DNA testing on biological evidence from the case. Requests to the Goldsboro Police Department were repeatedly met with the response that the evidence had been destroyed. In 2007, the department located a nightgown belonging to the victim that had been held in storage all along. DNA analysis of that garment not only excluded Dail as the source, it matched William Neal, a man already imprisoned in North Carolina for other offenses. Neal was subsequently convicted of the assault in 2010 and sentenced to three consecutive life terms without parole. On August 28, 2007, a Wayne County judge vacated Dail's convictions. He walked out of prison after serving 18 years.
In August 2010, Dail filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court against the City of Goldsboro and individual police officials. The complaint alleged that investigators were negligent in evidence collection and maintenance, that repeated denials about the existence of biological evidence obstructed Dail's access to exculpatory material, and that these failures prolonged his imprisonment well beyond the point when DNA testing could have freed him. E. Spencer Parris and G. Christopher Olson of Martin and Jones served as co-counsel alongside Burton Craige and Narendra Ghosh of Patterson Harkavy LLP.
The case proceeded through three mediated settlement conferences before Judge Terence Boyle in the Eastern District of North Carolina. The City of Goldsboro and its insurers ultimately agreed to resolve all claims. On November 19, 2013, the parties announced a total settlement of $7,520,000. The City contributed $2.71 million directly; insurance carriers paid the remaining $4.81 million. The state of North Carolina had previously compensated Dail separately, paying him more than $350,000 under the state's wrongful conviction compensation statute.
In a statement following the resolution, city spokeswoman Kim Best acknowledged that 'the evidence was not catalogued and maintained sufficiently, which prolonged his imprisonment.' The Goldsboro Police Department adopted new evidence-management policies as part of the fallout from the case. Dail was 44 years old at the time the settlement was announced.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Martin & Jones
All Martin & Jones proven verdicts →Hoyt Tessener of Martin and Jones, joined by co-counsel Kent Emison, secured a $31 million settlement for a boy left paraplegic when a two-point rear lap belt in a 1999 Ford Escort jackknifed him during a crash, while other occupants of the same car came away with comparatively minor injuries.
Forest Horne secured a $7.5 million jury verdict for a retired CSX railroad worker whose decades of on-the-job asbestos exposure caused malignant mesothelioma, a verdict the North Carolina Court of Appeals unanimously upheld in 2006.
Related civil rights verdicts
An Essex County jury awarded $165.97 million against the State of New Jersey and its Division of Youth and Family Services for failing to remove an infant from his home despite his grandmother's abuse report, a verdict reported as the largest in state personal injury history. The trial judge cut it to $102.6 million on remittitur, and in April 2017 the Appellate Division reversed the judgment entirely on qualified immunity grounds under the Tort Claims Act. The family collected nothing from the State.
On December 14, 2019 Emily Gaines, an 18-year-old Moore High School senior, was driving to take the ACT when Sgt. Kyle Lloyd of the Moore Police Department, off duty and rushing a key to another officer's patrol car for a department event, hit her broadside at 95 to 100 mph in a 50 zone. She died at the scene. On April 1, 2026 a federal jury returned $126,000,000. The court entered $90,000,000 against Lloyd, who is in prison, and cut the $36,000,000 against the City to $125,000 under Oklahoma's Governmental Tort Claims Act.
The Popham Law Firm secured a $57 million settlement on behalf of more than 1,700 Sprint employees who alleged the company's automated performance system unlawfully targeted workers over 40 during a series of mass layoffs, at the time the largest ADEA class settlement in the District of Kansas.
Ben Crump, with Connecticut co-counsel Louis Rubano and R.J. Weber, secured a $45 million settlement from the City of New Haven for Richard "Randy" Cox, who was left paralyzed from the chest down after being thrown headfirst into the wall of a police transport van while handcuffed. At announcement it was described as the largest settlement ever reached in a U.S. police-misconduct case, surpassing the George Floyd settlement.