After North Carolina was forced to release a series of wrongly convicted people from prisons early in the decade, leaders established a pioneering agency to swiftly assess claims of innocence.

Three years later, the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission has yet to free anyone, and its latest push for an exoneration in an 18-year-old murder case is bringing harsh criticism following bizarre claims from a key witness. Experts and justice reform advocates wonder whether similar efforts in other states will be a tough sell without any North Carolina cases to point to as successes.

"Public opinion, which initially might favor a state agency that tries to get convictions right, may lose patience when they find that there have been hundreds of investigations, none of which has ended in a reversal," said Jack Levin, a criminology professor at Northeastern University.

North Carolina remains the only state with a government agency solely dedicated to verifying claims of innocence. The commission's five-person staff has waded through hundreds of files and so far moved only one other case to a panel of judges, who denied an exoneration.

Such time-consuming work has given pause to several other states as they search for the best ways to cleanse their systems of wrongful convictions stemming from now-outdated methods of gathering and analyzing evidence. In Texas, officials are assessing the causes of wrongful convictions. Lawmakers in Ohio are considering requiring videotaped interrogations, double-blind photo lineups and DNA preservation.

"North Carolina's setting the stage, and we're all just kind of waiting to see how it turns out," said Natalie Roetzel, executive director of the nonprofit Innocence Project of Texas.

The commission's latest case involves Craig Taylor, who is serving a minimum of six years in prison as a habitual felon. He says he's the real culprit in the 1991 beating death of 26-year-old Jacquetta Thomas, whose body was found on a Raleigh street in September 1991; another man, Greg Taylor, who is not related, was convicted and is serving time for her slaying.

Colon Willoughby, the district attorney whose murder case is being questioned, said the confession is shaky because Craig Taylor has made a habit of admitting to killings, some of which he could not have committed. In the past four months, he's confessed to dozens, even telling an Associated Press reporter that he killed prostitutes and drug-dealing rivals while dumping some bodies in the Chesapeake Bay for sharks to eat.