Winston-Salem who had taken the case pro-bono, would question witnesses and make the oral arguments. Clinical Professor Theresa Newman '88, who co-directs the Wrongful Convictions Clinic, would be co-counsel. David Bernstein '06, who worked on Smith's case as a student Innocence Project volunteer, flew in from New York where he was an associate at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobs. He had conducted legal research for the motion with assistance from other associates through the firm's pro-bono program.

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SMITH'S THREE LAWYERS AND COLEMAN felt they had strong legal grounds for a new trial. First, there was evidence of incompetence by Smith's trial lawyer, who had spent only 59 hours on the case prior to trial and had allowed the brain-damaged victim to identify Smith without a challenge. They also had evidence that prosecutors had failed to produce evidence, in violation of the Supreme Court's 1963 ruling in Brady v. Maryland. And the two witnesses who testified against Smith at his trial had since recanted and would testify that police had pressured them for their testimony.

"It was clearly the strongest post-conviction claim I ever had," says Pishko.

But there was more than the law driving them as they worked into the night preparing for court. They all had taken the leap of faith lawyers rarely make: they believed their client was innocent.

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THE DEC. 9, 1995, attack against Jill Marker had been big news in Winston-Salem.

She was beaten as she was getting ready to close up the Silk Plant Forest, an artificial plant store in a busy shopping center that was stocked that week with Christmas trees and decorations.

The beating left her in a coma with a fractured skull. The local media closely followed the investigation and the progress of her limited recovery, reporting on the birth of her infant son while she was in the coma and her transfer to a nursing home close to her parents' Ohio home, but the crime remained unsolved.

At first police focused their investigation on a 46-year-old white man named Ken Lamoureux. He had a history of domestic violence and psychiatric problems and met Marker when she taught at his children's day-care center. At least two witnesses saw Lamoureux in the store the night of the attack. But the investigation ran cold, and he was dropped as a suspect.

Smith first came to police attention in June 1996, after a jilted girlfriend reported him. He also was dropped as a suspect after he passed a polygraph test. But in January 1997, another jilted girlfriend reported him to police. After an interrogation, Smith signed a statement, putting himself at the crime scene. He was arrested immediately.

The case against him fell into place quickly. One friend told police he had been at the plant store with Smith. Another told police that she heard Smith brag about the beating. And three months before the trial, Marker purportedly identified him from a photo lineup.

Still unable to speak or walk and nearly blind, she made a dramatic witness at his trial. Prosecutors wheeled her in and she pointed to Smith as her attacker.

After deliberating for two days, the jury convicted Smith of assault with intent to kill and armed robbery.

wrongful arrest when three white lacrosse players were charged with sexual assault.

The national press descended on the campus to tell the story of students at the elite school who had gotten what was coming to them. That story quickly blew up, as evidence of a false accusation emerged. Eventually the state attorney general intervened, charges against the students were dropped, and the prosecutor who had treated them unfairly was forced to resign in disgrace.

After leading an internal review of the lacrosse team's conduct on campus, Coleman was one of the first to suggest there was misconduct by the local police and prosecutor.

He can't help but compare Smith's case to that of the three lacrosse players who had the best lawyers in the state defending them. He notes the roles that race and resources play in the outcome of such cases and the importance of the attorney general and bar officials being concerned about the injustice. Coleman points to comments made by Reade Seligmann, one of the exonerated lacrosse players, after charges against him were dropped.

"This entire experience has opened my eyes up to a tragic world of injustice I never knew existed," Seligmann said. "If it is possible for law enforcement officials to systematically railroad us with no evidence whatsoever, it is frightening to think what they could do to those who do not have the resources to defend themselves."

Keith joined defense attorneys in asking for the charges against Hunt to be dismissed.

Coleman praises Keith's initial cooperation. Keith signed a voluntary consent order giving the Duke Innocence Project access to the prosecutor's files in Smith's case and encouraged the police to make their evidence available.

The police files contained a video of an interview with Marker in October 1996, three months before Smith's arrest. Coleman had read about the interview in the police reports, and he suspected that Marker had been shown a photo lineup that included Smith's picture, but he had never seen the video.

It showed Marker reviewing three photo spreads, two of black men and one of white men. Because she could not speak, police asked her to nod her head 'yes,' or shake her head 'no,' in answer to their questions. Marker was unable to identify any of the black men, and appeared to identify a man in the lineup of white men.

The video forms the crux of Smith's argument for a new trial. The police reports say nothing about the photo lineups or whose pictures she saw, and the photos were never shared with the defense before trial, as they should have been. Yet at the January hearing, the lead detective in the case testified that one of the lineups included Smith's picture and another included a photo of Lamoureux.

If Marker could not identify Smith as her attacker in October 1996, how was it that she identified him a year later at his trial, asked Coleman? And if Smith's trial lawyer had seen the video, why had he not used it to challenge her testimony? If he had not seen it, then the prosecutors were guilty of misconduct.

Coleman says that once he brought his questions to Keith, the district attorney stopped returning his phone calls and emails. Still, Coleman pressed Keith to work with him on Smith's release long after his students urged him to give up, hoping to change the way prosecutors and defense advocates work on such cases.

But by late 2007, with no movement from the prosecutor's office, Coleman and Newman decided it was time to go back to the adversarial model and file a motion for a new trial. That meant they needed to find a trial lawyer in Winston-Salem to argue the case. They were referred to Pishko through Hunt's attorney.

knew the pressures on the judge. Marker is blind and the state's witnesses have all recanted. Giving Smith a new trial would have amounted to setting him free.

For the last day of the hearing the bailiffs cleared the first two rows. Smith took that as a bad sign; court officials would want a buffer zone if he lost, to maintain order in the courtroom.

That morning, after hearing argument from the lawyers for both sides, Judge Richard Doughton denied the motion without comment and instructed the state to draft an order.

In the days leading up to the hearing, his lawyers had done their best to boost Smith's confidence and at the same time help him prepare for a loss. They knew the odds, but the loss was harder than they expected.

"I told him it was round one of a 15-rounder," Pishko recalls of trying to console Smith. "I told him we were going to keep fighting and he needed to keep his hopes up and stick with us."

Newman found herself holding back tears.

"I never thought it was hopeless, because the law was on our side," she says. "We really did win on the law."

All members of Smith's legal team say they laid solid groundwork for an appeal, either in state or federal court. And Coleman is confident that some day they'll find evidence that points to the real attacker. He is already working to track down a woman he believes was talking to Marker on the phone shortly before the attack. Maybe she knows who was in the store that night.

"I think we'll get him out of prison by getting his conviction overturned," Coleman says.

But that won't be enough. Coleman wants to prove his innocence. To do that, he believes he will need to solve the crime.