Louisiana Supreme Court Frees Death Row Prisoner, Calling Evidence Against Him “Scientifically Indefensible”

Former Louisiana death row inmate Jimmie “Chris” Duncan is officially a free man following a unanimous ruling Monday by the Louisiana Supreme Court. In the opinion, justices upheld a lower court’s decision to toss out Duncan’s 1998 conviction for killing his former girlfriend’s toddler, Haley Oliveaux, citing flawed forensics practices used to convict him. 

Justice Cade R. Cole wrote on behalf of the seven-member court that new evidence presented by Duncan’s legal team left no doubt that his conviction should be overturned.

“The post-conviction evidence undermined the core factual premises on which the state depended,” Cole wrote in the official opinion.

Two other justices, including Chief Justice John Weimer, issued opinions concurring with Cole.  

“I am flooded with relief,” said Chris Fabricant, a member of Duncan’s legal team and director of strategic litigation with the Innocence Project in New York, in an interview. “It would have been a moral outrage for the conviction to be reinstated.”

The court’s ruling came after a 2025 Verite News and ProPublica investigation examined the reliability of the key forensic evidence used to convict Duncan, now 57. At the time, he faced the possibility of being put to death as Gov. Jeff Landry, a staunch death penalty advocate, made moves to expedite executions after a 15-year pause.

Duncan’s conviction was based largely on now-discredited bite mark evidence presented by forensic dentist Michael West and pathologist Steven Hayne. Their analysis, which was critical to Ouachita Parish prosecutors securing Duncan’s conviction, claimed to match marks on Haley’s body to Duncan’s teeth. 

But experts have since deemed such evidence, fairly common at the time of Duncan’s 1998 trial, to be junk science. Meanwhile, the longtime partnership between West and Hayne has come under scrutiny from civil rights attorneys, forensic experts and the courts over concerns about the validity of their techniques.

In the 28 years since Duncan’s trial, nine other prisoners have been set free after being convicted in part on inaccurate evidence given by West and Hayne. Three of those men were on death row. Duncan was the last person awaiting an execution based on the pair’s work.

In his opinion, Cole reexamined the use of supposed bite marks, which were the only physical evidence tying Duncan to the alleged crime. Cole pointed to a video of West’s 1993 examination of Haley, which was not shown to jurors at trial. In that recording, West can be seen taking a mold of Duncan’s teeth and grinding it into and across the girl’s body, seemingly creating bite marks where none previously existed. Referencing previous testimony from a defense expert, Cole wrote that “it was ‘scientifically indefensible’ to identify those marks as having been made by Duncan, and that the angles shown in the West Video were physically impossible for a human bite.”

West has previously said he was simply using what he called a “direct comparison” technique — in which he presses a mold of a person’s teeth directly onto the location of suspected bite marks.

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Weimer wrote in a concurrence that the bite mark evidence used to prosecute Duncan was similar to “trial by water” tests used by witch-hunters in the 17th century, in which suspected witches were bound with rope and lowered into a body of water. If they floated, they were considered guilty of witchcraft, while those who “passed” the test by sinking often drowned. 

“We now look back at those practices as asinine and absurd, since those who fell victim to those practices often did not survive, regardless of whether they were found guilty or innocent,” Weimer wrote. “The bite mark evidence and the sexual abuse evidence used in the trial against the accused has proven to be similarly specious.”

Duncan’s prosecution “demonstrates we cannot be too careful in determining whether the death penalty should be implemented in cases such as this case because of the finality of the sentence and the impossibility of rectification,” Weimer wrote.“Such an irreversible and tragic consequence is inimical and deleterious to our system of justice if carried out based on evidence that is devoid of legitimacy.”

“This Should Be the End of This Case”

Police arrested Duncan on Dec. 18, 1993. He was babysitting Haley that day in the home he shared with the girl’s mother in West Monroe. Duncan told law enforcement he had put the child in the bath, then went downstairs to wash dishes. When he heard a noise coming from the bathroom, he rushed upstairs to check on her and found Haley floating face down in the water. She was pronounced dead a few hours later.

Duncan was initially booked for negligent homicide, but prosecutors upped the charge to first-degree murder after Hayne and West conducted Haley’s medical exam and claimed they discovered evidence, including the purported bite marks, that she had been sexually assaulted and intentionally drowned. Following two weeks of testimony during the trial in 1998, the jury found Duncan guilty and sentenced him to death.

While Duncan awaited an execution date, his new team of postconviction attorneys uncovered evidence that pointed to his innocence, including an expert witness who said that the child’s death was not a homicide but the result of an accidental drowning. In addition, investigators working for Duncan’s legal team interviewed a jailhouse informant who recanted his earlier trial testimony that Duncan had confessed to the crime.

Duncan’s conviction was overturned in April of last year by former Ouachita Parish Judge Alvin Sharp. He was let out of prison on bail in December, but he continued to await a final decision on his case after prosecutors appealed Sharp’s ruling. 

Steve Tew, district attorney for Ouachita and Morehouse parishes, has never wavered in his insistence that Duncan was guilty of murder and that he should be put to death. His office appealed Sharp’s decision to the state Supreme Court.

During oral arguments in April, Tew said that since Duncan was the only person with Haley at the time of her death, his guilt could not be debated. “We don’t need the bite mark evidence to put Mr. Duncan in the apartment alone with this child,” Tew said.

Haley’s mother, Allison Layton Statham, has publicly supported Duncan’s release from prison and the overturning of his conviction; so have family members of Haley’s father, Lloyd Donald Oliveaux, who died in 1996. They have excoriated the state’s tactics, claiming they repeatedly asked for a meeting with prosecutors to express their concerns, but never received a response.

Tew, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday, said at the April hearing that should the Supreme Court refuse to reinstate Duncan’s conviction, he would retry him, though he did not say what charge he might pursue.

When asked about the prospect of Duncan being retried for murder, Fabricant, the Innocence Project attorney, said, “If there is any sense of fairness and justice left, this should be the end of this case.”

In addition to the Innocence Project, Duncan’s legal team includes the Mwalimu Center for Justice in New Orleans and the Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner law firm in Atlanta. 

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