On guard with research: Innocence Project student director Montgomery-Blinn, left, and law professor Coleman photos:Chris Hildreth

Weitzel, former managing editor of The Miami Herald, also involved the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communications in the project through a course he team-teaches to train investigative reporters. Bringing journalism students into the investigative work follows a precedent set at Northwestern University, where students from the Medill School of Journalism work with the Center for Wrongful Convictions. That program has been involved in overturning nine death-row cases, prompting Illinois governor George H. Ryan in January 2001 to suspend executions in the state until the system can be fixed to prevent wrongful convictions. In May, Maryland governor Parris N. Glendening imposed a similar moratorium on state-sponsored executions. In North Carolina, a notable number of the largest local governments have petitioned the legislature to enact a statewide moratorium on executions. The anti-death penalty movement here, largely fueled by a coalition of the state's faith communities, has raised the specter of wrongful convictions as a key component of its platform.

According to Duke law student John Guild, as the program has gotten up and running and word of its existence has begun to spread among inmates, the number of letters coming into the North Carolina Center for Actual Innocence has increased three-fold, to some fifty to seventy-five per week. "Our initial screening eliminates some 60 to 70 percent of them," he says. Those inmates who clear that first stage are sent a questionnaire and asked to submit copies of any materials that might help verify their claim. From this pool, another 90 percent of the cases will be rejected. Ultimately, a panel of faculty and students examine the most compelling cases submitted and debate the feasibility of proving a wrongful conviction. Once a case is accepted, a faculty member, a Center officer, or a local attorney working pro bono will take on the investigation, assigning student volunteers as staff for the effort.

Among the fifteen to twenty cases that make it to the stage of full investigation in a given year, Henry Baker's case, many believe, may offer the best first shot at proving a wrongful conviction for the nascent Duke project. At UNC, another case being investigated by journalism students has also taken a positive turn.

"Of all the ingredients we studied in class that can be part of a wrongful conviction, Henry Baker's case seems to have them all," says Montgomery-Blinn, who is spending the summer before her final year of law school working in a local district attorney's office to understand the criminal justice system from the prosecutorial side. At the same time, she continues her work on the Baker investigation. She says the case is so riddled with anomalies that it would make a great book, one that she'd like to write if Baker's conviction is eventually overturned.

Jim Coleman says he believes it is very likely that Henry Baker is telling the truth about what happened to him--namely, he was framed by a corrupt county sheriff's department for the killing of the convenience-store operator. Not long after Baker's trial, the sheriff himself was convicted for involvement in a prostitution ring. The sheriff may have had reason to protect the real murderer, who, Baker claims, went around town boasting that he killed the store operator himself.

Such speculation is not nearly as persuasive as what the Duke investigating team has found relating to the victim's autopsy report. After twice reviewing the autopsy materials, North Carolina's current medical examiner has confirmed that the victim was shot not once, but twice--once in the chest and once in the back--by a handgun, not a shotgun. The words "shotgun wound" appear three times on the cover sheet of the autopsy report. But that finding, the state medical examiner said, is contradicted by information in subsequent pages of the report detailing the size and shape of the wounds and the nature of the lead that was removed from the victim's body. The spent shotgun shell found in Baker's car would thus be irrelevant to the case. While the medical examiner of the county in question has died, the physician who actually conducted the victim's autopsy and wrote the references to a "shotgun wound" in the report has been located by the investigating team in another part of North Carolina. He recently admitted in writing that references to the shotgun wound were obviously erroneous.

The single eyewitness in the Baker case is also being sought by the Duke team. Investigators have reason to believe that the witness changed his testimony at trial, contradicting an earlier story in which he said there were indeed two shots fired, not one. Coleman says this points up the most common factor in wrongful convictions, namely, the tendency to rely on the testimony of a single eyewitness. "Overall, if the state did thorough investigations and kept an open mind about suspects, we'd not be in this situation," Coleman argues, "but there is more often a rush to convict, rather than an effort to see justice done."

Or as Barry Scheck put it in an interview with PBS's Frontline program in 1997, "What these cases are telling us, something that we already knew from other studies, is that mistaken identification is the single greatest cause of the conviction of the innocent. It's true today. It's always been true. DNA testing is showing us, with a great deal of scientific certainty, that it's an even greater problem than we suspected."

In the Baker case, why would the witness lie? "Maybe the sheriff's department convinced him to do so since he was the only evidence they had," Coleman speculates.

Among the other players in the case, the court-appointed attorney who represented Baker has told the investigative team that he was always convinced of Baker's innocence and was shocked when his client was convicted. Yet, Coleman says, the attorney apparently did not do a very good job attacking the contradictions between the testimony and the autopsy report, or in closely questioning the eyewitness.

Seventy to 75 percent of people in prison today went to trial with a court-appointed attorney, according to Coleman. "In most court districts in North Carolina, these attorneys are not public defenders," he says. "Instead, they are attorneys who take the cases because they are just starting in practice and need the work or they don't have other work because they are not very good at what they do." The pay is too low for successful attorneys to take on such cases. "Judges are satisfied to appoint a lawyer who is breathing, not necessarily one who has appropriate experience," he says.

In Baker's case, the difficulty did not stop with his attorney. It was pure luck that the investigative team managed to find the summary of Baker's court transcript. It had been misfiled in the local clerk of court's office. "When the clerk's office files records, they are not always thinking about whether someone might need to get that file later or how they will find it--that a case might need to be reopened," says Coleman. The urge to dispatch justice efficiently and find closure for the victim's family is enormous.