WARREN – As the weeks, months and years tick away with Dennis Dechaine behind bars, his supporters gather each month in homes, churches and restaurants across Maine in support of the state’s most notorious inmate.

It has been nearly 17 years since Dechaine was charged with the rape and murder of 12-year-old Sarah Cherry in the woods in Bowdoin. The one-time farmer was convicted and sentenced to life behind bars, and has been at the Maine State Prison ever since.

But even in maximum security, Dechaine is far from forgotten. In fact, the passion and numbers of those who want him freed grows with each passing year.

The support network behind Dechaine has morphed into a grass-roots political campaign with 10 chapters across Maine, and others in Connecticut and Florida. Every month, organizers hold meetings that draw anywhere from a handful to more than a dozen people each to talk about developments in Dechaine’s case and how to further his cause.

The juggernaut to save Dennis Dechaine doesn’t stop there.

Nearly $200,000 has been raised on his behalf, and more than 850 people receive e-mail newsletters in his support. His backers lobby legislators, push for new laws. A Web site devoted to his cause gets about 100 visitors a day.

On three occasions, supporters have held what they’ve called Dennis Dechaine Day, paying tribute to him as if he were a hero.

Just this month, they released a public opinion poll they commissioned asking 400 registered Maine voters if they were in favor of giving Dechaine a new trial.

“We aren’t going to stop,” said Carol Waltman of Madawaska, who has known Dechaine since childhood and founded the Dechaine support group, Trial and Error. “This is a life that is wasted, and life is too precious to waste.”

Say the name Dennis Dechaine around Maine and you’ll likely get a strong response. While he has some avid allies, there are plenty of others who say he is nothing more than a child killer who had his day in court.

For every Dechaine partisan there are thousands of others who are just as convinced of his guilt, said the Rev. Bob Dorr of Waldoboro, a friend of Sarah Cherry’s family who speaks on their behalf. He said Trial and Error members can be confrontational and are insensitive to the family’s pain.

“They present that they have this great following. But that is not true at all,” Dorr said.

Now 47 and still with a boyish face, Dechaine insists on his innocence and says a review of the evidence, including DNA samples, eventually will clear him. A court hearing on his motion for a new trial is expected to be held in September.

Dechaine, who lives in a cell pod with 55 other prisoners, passes the time reading books, magazines and newspapers. He teaches French to other inmates, making use of his French literature degree from Western Washington University. He receives lots of mail – since Christmas he has received more than a grocery bag worth of letters from family, friends and supporters, many of whom he doesn’t even know.

“It’s hard for me to be too hopeful because I’ve been disappointed too many times,” Dechaine said in an interview at the prison. “But the spark of hope never really dies, and if it did I think I’d die.”‘

It was July 6, 1988, when Sarah Cherry went missing from a home where she was baby-sitting in Bowdoin, a town of 2,700 people about 40 miles from Portland.

Her body was found two days later under a pile of brush. Her hands were bound with yellow rope. She had been raped with sticks, strangled with a scarf and stabbed repeatedly with a small blade in the head, neck and chest.

From the start, the evidence pointed to Dechaine.

Her body was about 400 feet from where Dechaine’s pickup truck was found parked the night of her disappearance. Dechaine, who lived the next town over, was questioned by police after walking out of the woods that night. He said he’d become lost while fishing, but he later admitted he’d been injecting speed.

A car repair bill and notebook belonging to Dechaine were found in the driveway of the home from which Cherry had disappeared. The rope that bound Cherry was of the same material as yellow rope found in the back of Dechaine’s truck. Police said Dechaine confessed to the murder – but he insists that his words were twisted.

At his trial in March 1989, a jury deliberated nine hours before finding him guilty of murder. Justice Carl Bradford sentenced Dechaine, then 31, to life in prison.

For most prisoners, that would be the end of the story. They would spend their days in the state’s maximum security prison, out of sight and out of mind.

But the Dechaine case is far from ordinary.

It has drawn the attention of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic in New York co-founded by Barry Scheck, who was part of O.J. Simpson’s defense team. The clinic takes on cases where it feels DNA testing can prove prisoners’ innocence.

The Innocence Project says there are prisoners elsewhere with support outside prison, but there may not be any with the type of organization that has grown up around Dechaine.

“Nobody we know of has the grass-roots support network like that we see for Dennis Dechaine,” said Colin Starger, an Innocence Project attorney who is assigned to Dechaine’s case. “So that’s something that’s quite unique.”

After Dechaine’s trial, friends in northern Maine formed Trial and Error in support of one of their own. Dechaine grew up in the Franco-American town of Madawaska along northern Maine’s border with Canada, the youngest of four boys in a family that ran a Texaco station and a taxi service. His mother died of cancer when he was 9, his dad died of a heart attack when he was 14.

Dechaine’s backers assert that investigators doctored notes and that prosecutors incinerated evidence after the trial that could have later helped clear him. They say investigators glossed over alternative suspects, including a man who had been indicted on a child sexual abuse charge that year.

They contend that the evidence shows Dechaine was in police custody at the time of Cherry’s death, and that the state has gone to great lengths to hide evidence. New DNA tests show that somebody else’s DNA, but not Dechaine’s, was found under Cherry’s fingernails. Back in 1989, the state objected to and the judge denied Dechaine’s request for DNA tests.

And supporters say that Dechaine – educated, articulate and with a reputation for nonviolence – doesn’t fit the profile of a murderer.

Come late summer or early fall, Bradford – the same judge who sentenced Dechaine to life in prison – will hold a hearing on a motion for a new trial based on DNA evidence. The evidence is undergoing testing.

While Dechaine has always had supporters, it was Jim Moore’s 2002 book, “Human Sacrifice,” that swelled their ranks. Moore, a former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent who at one time was convinced of Dechaine’s guilt, investigated on his own and came to a different conclusion. Eight thousand copies have been published, with royalties going to Trial and Error.

One of the readers of “Human Sacrifice” was Morrison Bonpasse, 57, of Newcastle. Bonpasse felt so strongly after finishing the book that within days he created a Trial and Error Web site and was searching for a new attorney for Dechaine.

Under Bonpasse’s wing, Trial and Error has grown to a dozen chapters – they’ve popped up in Portland, Rumford, Brewer, Augusta, Belfast and elsewhere. And hundreds of subscribers receive an e-mail newsletter about Dechaine.

More than 6,000 people have signed a petition calling for an independent investigation of the case. Trial and Error also paid for a poll that it says shows that 54 percent of Mainers favor a retrial for Dennis Dechaine.

On three occasions, supporters have gathered in the State House for so-called Dennis Dechaine Days, where they put out a life-size cardboard cutout of Dechaine and speak out to anyone who will listen. Once, Dechaine himself addressed supporters from prison on a speaker phone that was set up in a State House conference room.

Bonpasse intentionally has made Dechaine’s cause a political one.

“I call it ‘Campaign for Dennis,”‘ Bonpasse said.

At the least, people have taken notice.

State Rep. Ross Paradis, D-Frenchville, is pushing a resolution in the Legislature that seeks a new trial for Dechaine. Last October, Attorney General G. Steven Rowe appointed a three-member panel to review allegations of misconduct in the investigation of the Sarah Cherry murder.

Lawmakers passed a measure two years ago that opened up Dechaine’s files to the public. And last year, legislators passed a statute that some call the “Dennis Dechaine law” that requires confessions in criminal cases to be videotaped.

But prosecutors say the case doesn’t belong in a political arena. Bill Stokes, chief of the criminal division for the Attorney General’s Office, said the case will be decided in the courtroom, not in newspapers or in the State House.

“Our point has always been that this is a judicial process, and it should remain a judicial process, and the evidence will be placed before the judge,” he said.

Michaela Murphy, a Waterville attorney who represents Dechaine, also disagrees with some of Trial and Error’s tactics and its interpretation of some of the evidence. Many of Dechaine’s supporters are quick to bad-mouth the Attorney General’s Office in general and specific prosecutors by name.

Murphy says that Dechaine didn’t get a fair trial, but she believes it’s not productive to cast prosecutors as “evildoers” who are involved in a conspiracy against Dechaine.

The case, some suggest, has all the makings of a movie. And Dechaine’s backers say there are eerie similarities to “The Shawshank Redemption,” the 1994 movie about a Maine man wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and her lover and sent to life in prison.

In the movie, Andy Dufresne escapes by tunneling out of his cell.

Dechaine still awaits the ending of his story.

“There are comparisons,” said Dechaine, “but the truth of the matter is this is a serious matter and it has nothing to do with fiction.”