photo:Chris Hildreth

n Valentine's Day in 1976, Henry Baker (not his real name) was passing by the convenience store near his home on the outskirts of a small eastern North Carolina town when he noticed an usual amount of activity. Baker, a local mechanic who had just celebrated his thirty-eighth birthday with his family the evening before, was a regular customer. As it turned out, the owner of the convenience store had been shot in the chest at close range. By his own account, before he knew what to make of it all, Henry Baker was the prime suspect in the killing.

At trial, a sheriff's deputy introduced damning physical evidence--a spent shotgun shell found in Baker's car. A single eyewitness said that the perpetrator used a sawed-off shotgun. A local physician testified that the autopsy confirmed that the victim had been killed with a shotgun.

Baker was found guilty and was automatically sentenced to death only hours before the North Carolina Supreme Court handed down a decision overturning the state law that made the death penalty mandatory in first-degree murder cases. Though he avoided the death sentence, he has now spent twenty-six years in prison. He was eligible for parole, after serving twenty years, but it has not been granted. At sixty-four, Baker has gone partially blind because, he claims, a long-term assignment to a work detail that involved powerful chemicals damaged his eyesight. His seven children, who live all across the Southeast, don't really know their father anymore, especially the daughter who was an infant when Baker was convicted. All these years, Baker has maintained his innocence and has been a well-mannered prisoner. He is now in a minimum-security facility on the North Carolina coast.

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Two Duke law students went to the prison with James Coleman, law professor and senior associate law school dean, to visit Baker one scorching day in April of last year and hear his story first-hand. Some months before, Baker had written to the Innocence Project, a relatively new collaborative effort between Duke's law school and the University of North Carolina's schools of law and journalism. This pro-bono, student-driven initiative accepts queries from convicted felons imprisoned in North Carolina who assert their innocence (rather than taking issue with any legal or procedural error) and have at least three years left in their prison terms.

Kendra Montgomery-Blinn, student director of the Innocence Project last year and a third-year law student this fall, is one of only a handful of Duke law students who are considering careers in the criminal justice system. (Most of her peers are planning careers in civil or corporate practice.) Montgomery-Blinn has been working on Henry Baker's case since her first year at Duke and visited him on that hot April afternoon last year.

"We asked him to tell us what happened, wanting to see if his story was consistent with the transcripts, his letters, and the appellate documents. It was very consistent. He even told us things that had hurt his case." Over the years, Baker had written to the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union, and others. "We were the first ones who responded," says Montgomery-Blinn.

The Innocence Project gives Duke law students who volunteer what may be their only first-hand experience with the criminal justice system. Beyond that, it is part of a nationwide network of similar law-school-based projects that have been steadily adding to the growing evidence of a disturbing prevalence of wrongful convictions in U.S. courts, particularly in capital cases.

In the most comprehensive study of U.S. death-penalty cases to date, released two years ago, criminologists and lawyers at Columbia University found that two out of every three capital sentences they reviewed were overturned on appeal due to errors or inappropriate conduct at trial. The findings included the presence of incompetent defense, exculpatory evidence suppressed by police and prosecutors, misinformed jurors, and biased judges.

While the Columbia study focused on flaws in the system leading to wrongful convictions, the increasing use of DNA evidence to overturn guilty verdicts has brought a much higher visibility to the potential number of actually innocent prisoners who are incarcerated. Since forensic DNA testing became possible in the late 1980s, an increasing number of cases involving biological evidence have been reopened (when physical materials can still be retrieved for testing). Some 100 people in the United States have been set free after being exonerated by DNA testing, according to data from the Innocence Project at Yeshiva University's Cardozo Law School, the first such project in the country. Established in 1992 by law professor Barry Scheck and criminal attorney Peter Neufeld, Cardozo's clinical-law program has represented or assisted scores of inmates whose convictions have been reversed or overturned based on a range of problems in the system.

As word of the Cardozo project spread throughout the nation's prisons, the volume of letters coming into the New York City-based law school led Scheck and Neufeld to organize a conference in 1998 on wrongful convictions. They also put out a call for help at the gathering. Law students from Duke and Carolina attended, along with Coleman, associate dean for academic affairs Theresa Newman J.D. '88, and UNC law professor Rich Rosen, who, in a highly publicized 1995 case, had introduced DNA evidence to overturn the ten-year-old rape conviction of a Burlington, North Carolina, man. The group came home from the conference ready to assist in cases of potential innocence in North Carolina.

The Cardozo connection also led to a Duke course on wrongful convictions conducted via satellite link with several other law schools around the country. In the first year, Cardozo supplied the case materials and lectures. Today, the course is offered the old-fashioned way: team-taught by Coleman, who currently chairs the American Bar Association's committee overseeing the ABA's call for a moratorium on the death penalty; Theresa Newman; and Pete Weitzel, executive director of the North Carolina Center for Actual Innocence, a nonprofit that is now a liaison between the Innocence Projects at Duke and UNC. The course helps create interest in the Innocence Project, leading to a number of students volunteering to conduct the initial case reviews.

Says Weitzel, "In North Carolina, we made the decision not to limit ourselves to cases involving only DNA testing or capital cases, which some other centers have done. Cardozo started with DNA-related cases and has been able to cherry-pick the most promising on a national basis. In North Carolina, with some diligence, we might have come up with four or five DNA cases that we could pursue, but what DNA investigations illustrate is just how wrong the system can be in normal circumstances, whether you have the conclusive proof--the silver bullet of DNA--or not."