The city of Durham, North Carolina agreed on May 20, 2024, to pay $7.75 million to resolve the wrongful conviction claim of exonerated prisoner Darryl Howard. He spent almost 24 years in prison before a federal jury agreed that former Durham cop Darrell Dowdy improperly manipulated evidence used to convict him. In addition to the payout, the City spent $5 million defending Howard’s lawsuit.

Howard was convicted in 1995 of strangling Doris Washington and her 13-year-old daughter Nishonda and setting their apartment on fire. Both victims had been sexually assaulted, police determined, but evidence was recovered only from Doris Washington—and it didn’t match to Howard. Then-Assistant District Attorney Mike Nifong brushed away any concerns over that, letting Dowdy tell jurors that semen found in the 13-year-old’s vagina and rectum had probably been left earlier in the week by her boyfriend. 

That’s right: They argued that no sexual assault had even been suspected because the young teen couple had probably engaged in consensual anal sex.

Nifong also failed to disclose that Doris Washington had been sexually assaulted, too. Instead he argued that she sold drugs for Howard, a neighbor who killed her over money she owed. Witnesses offered inconsistent testimony about arguments between the two. Howard admitted that he was a low-level cocaine dealer but denied employing the victim. He also said that he was getting high when the blaze erupted in her apartment.

In a memo to Dowdy, a police informant fingered a New York-based gang for the assaults and murders, noting that Doris Washington sold drugs for the group. But that memo also may not have been disclosed. If so, it wasn’t Nifong’s only ethical stumble; in 2006, he charged members of the Duke University lacrosse team with sexually assaulting a local stripper, despite evidence in hand that excluded them as suspects. For that Nifong served one day in jail and was disbarred in 2007, while the City paid team members $20 million to settle their claims. 

After Nifong was through with Howard’s case, jurors returned a guilty verdict. Howard was sentenced to a total of 80 years in prison—two consecutive 40-year terms for each of the murdered women plus a concurrent 40-year term for the arson. 

When lawyers from the Innocence Project got involved, they convinced a judge to submit evidence from the Washingtons’ rape kits to more modern DNA testing. The results excluded Howard—in fact, semen found inside Doris Washington matched to a member of the gang that the informant said she worked for. The attorneys also discovered the memo about the informant’s testimony to Dowdy, giving the lie to claims that he and Nifong made to jurors that no sexual assault was ever suspected or investigated. Based on that, Howard’s retrial was ordered in 2014; two years later, the city gave up fighting to sustain his conviction, and he was released.

But that wasn’t the end for Howard. He filed suit in federal court for the Middle District of North Carolina in 2017, and Durham spent another seven years fighting that before reaching the settlement. Howard’s suit named the City, four of its police officers and the fire department arson investigator, but only claims against Dowdy proceeded to trial. On December 1, 2021, a jury found Dowdy liable and awarded Howard $6 million. The City refused to pay the verdict, though. So in 2023, Howard sued the City, alleging it had a legal obligation to pay the verdict on Dowdy’s behalf.

Two events pushed the City to change course and come to the negotiating table. First, a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on May 30, 2023, reversed the district court’s dismissal of claims against Durham police officers Scott Pennica and Michelle Soucie, whom Howard’s second suit blamed for withholding video of their interview with Jones, after his DNA matched semen evidence from Doris Washington’s body. From that, the appellate court ruled, a jury could have found “that [they] intentionally hid evidence” from Howard. See: Howard v. City of Durham, 68 F.4th 934 (4th Cir. 2023). 

Then, in April 2023, Dowdy also sued the City, alleging that officials abandoned him after his 28 years working as a police officer and used him as a “pawn” in Howard’s litigation. The City agreed in early 2024 to settle Dowdy’s lawsuit for $350,000. See: Dowdy v. City of Durham, USDC (M.D.N.C.), Case No.1:23-cv-00133. 

An agreement followed on May 20, 2024, to pay $7.75 million to settle Howard’s claims against all Defendants. By that time, city records showed, another $5 million had gone to legal costs associated with fighting Howard’s suit. He was represented by attorneys with Patterson Harkavy LLP in Chapel Hill and Neufeld Scheck & Brustin LLP in New York City. See: Howard v. City of Durham, USDC (M.D.N.C.), Case No. 1:17-cv-00477.  

Additional sources: The Assembly, Raleigh News & Observer, WTVD, Washington Post

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