Dion Harrell

The Crime

Shortly after 10 p.m. on Sept. 18, 1988, a 17-year-old girl was walking home from her job at McDonald’s when a man approached and raped her.

Three days later, she saw 22-year-old Dion Harrell in the McDonald’s parking lot and called the police, believing him to be her attacker. Police picked up Mr. Harrell and brought him to the station.

Mr. Harrell, who firmly maintained his innocence, believed that the victim would realize her mistake upon taking another look at him. Instead, she once again affirmed that he was her attacker.

Mr. Harrell was charged with second-degree sexual assault and third-degree theft. 

The Trial

Mr. Harrell went to trial in Monmouth County Superior Court in May 1992. The victim identified him as her attacker. 

At the time, DNA testing was not yet available in New Jersey. A state police crime laboratory analyst, using blood type testing to examine the semen in the rape kit, testified that Mr. Harrell was among the 2% of the male population that could not be eliminated as the source.

Mr. Harrell denied committing the attack, and presented an alibi corroborated by multiple witnesses. On the night of the crime, he had played basketball with friends, then biked to a friend’s house with his nephew. Both his mother and his sister confirmed that he returned home from basketball, showered, and set off for his friend’s house around 10:30 p.m. That friend also attested that Mr. Harrell and his nephew had been at his house until 12:30 a.m.

On May 19, the jury convicted Mr. Harrell of second-degree sexual assault and acquitted him of the theft charge. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.

He was released on parole after four years in prison and was required to register as a sex offender. Over the next several years, he was twice convicted of failing to properly register and was sentenced to probation. Due to his sex offender status, he struggled to find or maintain a job, and drifted in and out of homelessness.

The Exoneration

In 1997, while still in prison, Mr. Harrell wrote to the Innocence Project for help. The Innocence Project, which at that time had a backlog of more than 10,000 such requests, agreed to take on his case in 2013. 

The reinvestigation revealed major flaws in the crime lab analyst’s testimony. The analyst had erroneously suggested that only 2% of the male population could not be excluded as the source of the semen, when in reality no one could be reasonably excluded. Dr. Joseph Warren, an expert in forensic biology, concluded that the analyst had made “egregious misstatements of conventional serology and statistics” which were “contrary to scientific principles generally accepted at the time (and today).”

In November 2013, in order to perform DNA testing, the Innocence Project requested the case’s physical evidence from the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office. Authorities initially asserted that the evidence no longer existed, but in the fall of 2014, they located slides made from the rape kit. Still, the prosecution opposed DNA testing on the basis that state law only permitted testing if defendants were in custody. 

In response, Innocence Project attorney Vanessa Potkin argued that it was fundamentally unfair to deny Mr. Harris testing that could prove his innocence, especially since spending 20 years on a sex offender registry had restricted Mr. Harris’ life. Moreover, Ms. Potkin noted that the National District Attorney’s Association had adopted a policy that DNA testing should be performed in any case at any stage, even after all appeals had been exhausted, if the testing could determine innocence.

In February 2015, two weeks before a judge was to rule on the motion for testing, the Prosecutor’s Office agreed to allow it.

In the meantime, the Innocence Project’s policy team worked to change the law in New Jersey. In November 2015, the state expanded the law to allow DNA testing for defendants even after their prison terms have ended.

In July 2016, the DNA test results excluded Mr. Harrell as the rapist, and the prosecution confirmed that it would request to vacate his conviction. On August 3, his conviction was vacated and the case was dismissed, as were his convictions for failing to register as a sex offender. 

In July 2018, Mr. Harrell filed a federal civil rights lawsuit seeking compensation for his wrongful conviction. The next month, he filed a claim for compensation with the state of New Jersey. The claim was settled for $250,000 in July 2020.

In January 2021, Mr. Harrell passed away in Long Branch, New Jersey.