Prosecutors block DNA test that could clear man’s name

A Long Branch man, convicted decades ago of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl in the city, has always maintained his innocence. Although Dion Harrell, 48, has been out of prison for about 17 years, after serving four years of an eight-year prison term, he still wants to clear his name.

But the Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office is blocking Harrell's attempt to have DNA from the 1988 crime analyzed to prove one way or another whether he is the man who committed the sexual assault.

An attorney for the New York-based Innocence Project plans to go before a judge on Monday in an attempt to force the state to test the DNA.

Attorney Vanessa Potkin said she hopes to convince Superior Court Judge Ronald L. Reisner to order testing done on the DNA collected from the victim of the sexual assault, which occurred on Broadway in Long Branch, late at night on Sept. 18, 1988. The crime occurred before DNA testing was available in New Jersey, Potkin said.

According to court papers filed in the case, Assistant Monmouth County Prosecutor Mary Juliano plans to oppose the DNA testing. In the filing, Juliano cites a state law that allows for DNA testing on evidence in the cases of convicted defendants currently imprisoned who are seeking exoneration. Harrell's case, Juliano said, does not meet the criteria because he has been freed.

Despite that, Potkin says Harrell's conviction on the sexual assault charge has thrown up roadblocks to his finding housing and employment because he is on the state's sex offender registry. His address is readily displayed on the Internet on the sex offender registry, she points out. And Harrell has twice been incarcerated since serving his sentence because he failed to register his whereabouts with police, a requirement for certain sex offenders under Megan's Law, Potkin said.

"It's a huge impediment to where you can live and where you can work,'' Potkin said of the sex-offender registry.

Harrell was 22 years old when he was accused of committing the sexual assault on the teenage girl, who worked at the McDonald's fast-food eatery on Broadway in Long Branch, across the street from where Harrell resided at the time, Potkin said.

The attack occurred sometime after 10 p.m., after the victim had finished working, Potkin said. As the girl was walking home on Broadway, she passed a man who made a lewd comment to her, and she told the man to leave her alone, according to Potkin. Instead, the man grabbed her from behind by the neck and dragged her 70 feet to an empty park lot, where he raped her. When the victim told her assailant that her father was across the street, the man grabbed her purse and fled, Potkin said.

The girl went home and told her mother, who called the police. She was taken to Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, where a rape kit with slides of evidence was collected, according to Potkin.

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Prosecutors block DNA test that could clear man's name