The facts sound familiar.
A rape victim in the early 1980s gives Jacksonville police a firm identification of her attacker under questionable circumstances. Prosecutors win a conviction with little more than her eyewitness testimony as the defendant professes innocence.
Years later, DNA evidence shows police arrested the wrong man - and observers wonder what has gone wrong with the criminal-justice system in North Carolina.
Two years ago, Gov. Mike Easley pardoned Lesly Jean, a former Marine, because DNA testing proved him innocent of a rape. Now Leo DeWitt Waters is close to having his name cleared because of new scientific evidence.
The crimes for which Jean and Waters were convicted happened in a 15-month span in 1981-82.
Jean was convicted despite testimony from four witnesses who said that he was on base at the time of the rape. He was released from prison in 1991 after a federal appeals court said that prosecutors wrongfully didn't disclose that investigators used hypnosis to help the victim identify Jean.
He was pardoned 10 years later based on DNA evidence.
Waters lingered in prison until Jan. 29, when a judge granted him a new trial. By the time Waters was released on $10,000 bond, he had served 21 years in prison.
He has a hearing scheduled for Monday. He could become at least the third person in North Carolina since 1995 to be exonerated by DNA evidence, and the second in Jacksonville.
District Attorney Dewey Hudson of Onslow County said he is reviewing Waters' case before deciding whether to retry him. He agreed that it appears that Jacksonville police made another mistake.
"That's extremely bizarre and certainly very troubling," Hudson said. "If he's innocent, that's just horrible."
Hudson said he plans to re-examine the evidence and interview the victim, who no longer lives in North Carolina. He also intends to find Katharine Koonce, the former Jacksonville detective who handled the case.
"The last thing I want to do is make another mistake," Hudson said.
Chief Deputy Sammy Phillips of the Jacksonville Police Department declined to comment through an assistant at his office.
Delma Collins, a retired assistant chief in the department who supervised the investigations of Jean and Waters, said he didn't remember details of Waters' case, but recalled that nothing about it at the time caused him concern.
He also said that Jacksonville has a strong police department, despite the outcomes of Waters' and Jean's cases.
"We had policy and procedure and we followed policy and procedure," said Collins, who retired three years ago and is the chairman of the Onslow County Board of Commissioners. "I was proud of the investigators who worked in our investigative division; still am."
Waters was convicted in a March 31, 1981, attack on a Jacksonville woman. Her hands and feet were bound and her eyes were taped shut before she was raped. The rapist was a man who answered her classified ad to sell a water bed, Waters' attorney, Mark Raynor, has said.
The victim looked at four police lineups without success, Raynor said. On Aug. 18, 1981, Koonce called the victim to come to the courthouse, he said.
Koonce took her into a courtroom where Waters faced misdemeanor charges for making obscene phone calls to another woman.
Koonce asked the woman if anyone looked familiar. The woman replied that she wasn't sure, Raynor said.
The victim was taken in a back room for a cup of coffee. She was brought back a few minutes later and seated near Waters. Waters then combed his hair.
"When he did that," Raynor has said, "(The woman) said, 'That's him. I'm positive.'"
Waters professed innocence at his trial. The morning of the attack, he said, he got home from working a midnight shift at a plant, took a shower and went to sleep.He was sentenced to two life terms and a 20-year-to-life term for rape, a related sex offense and robbery.
Raynor did not return several recent phone calls to his office and home to ask for comment about the case. It's not clear where Waters is staying until his next court date.
The case is another example of the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, said James Coleman, a Duke University law professor who works with the North Carolina Actual Innocence Project.
"Juries often think that an eyewitness is the most credible witness a prosecutor can have," Coleman said. "Everybody involved in the process knows the opposite."
Investigators and prosecutors often turn to eyewitnesses, though, because they realize what strong impressions they leave with jurors, Coleman said.
Coleman, a member of the North Carolina Commission on Actual Innocence, put together by Chief Justice I. Beverly Lake of the N.C. Supreme Court, said that some legal experts have suggested a jury instruction on the often dubious testimony of eyewitnesses.
Lake has promised that identification of suspects will be one of the topics dealt with by his commission.
The group of legislators, judges, prosecutors, police and others was formed in November to review how innocent people are convicted and determine how to treat them when the error is discovered.
It has met a few times, but has no timetable for action.
"We're finding out that by going about our ordinary way of business we're convicting innocent people," said Rich Rosen, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is also a member of Lake's commission.
Jacksonville was a rowdy, raucous town in the late 1970s and early '80s with a few solid blocks of strip bars and pool halls near the courthouse. Those who remember the time recall strings of fights and overworked police throughout that now dormant part of town.
"We were inundated," Collins said. "I hate to say it, but if you work enough cases, as bad as you hate for it to happen, it's like a race car, you're going to have a blowout."
Collins insisted that his investigators embraced new ways of doing their job and trained regularly at such schools as Northwestern University and the University of Georgia.
"One of the things we believed in in Jacksonville was training," he said. "Because we were understaffed, we were overtrained."
Coleman said he doubts that Jacksonville authorities did anything uniquely wrong to lead to the twin reversals.
"It just means the (innocent) ones out of the other counties haven't been discovered yet," he said. "We may never find them, but I don't have any doubt the same things are happening in other counties."