Jimmie “Chris” Duncan walked out of the Ouachita Parish Correctional Center and into the arms of his parents last week after spending the last 27 years on death row.
Seven months ago, a Louisiana district court judge vacated his murder conviction for killing his former girlfriend’s toddler, citing doubts about the evidence used to convict him. The judge granted bail after multiple legal delays, including an unsuccessful request by prosecutors to the Louisiana Supreme Court to stop his release. Now free, Duncan spent Thanksgiving with his family — then celebrated his 57th birthday the next day.
“We thank God for Jimmie coming home,” Duncan’s stepmom, Sharon Duncan, said in an emailed statement on behalf of the family.
But Duncan’s journey to freedom is far from over. Prosecutors have asked the state Supreme Court to reinstate his death sentence. Duncan’s attorneys declined to make him immediately available for an interview.
The April decision by Judge Alvin Sharp to set aside Duncan’s conviction and death sentence came after a Verite News and ProPublica investigation examined the reliability of the key forensic evidence used to convict him. At the time, Duncan 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.
Sharp, of the 4th Judicial District in Ouachita Parish, found that Duncan’s conviction was based in part on bite mark evidence now considered by experts to be junk science. That original analysis came from forensic dentist Michael West and pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne, whose longtime partnership as state experts has been questioned following concerns about the validity of their techniques. West, who did not respond to previous requests for comment, admitted in a 2011 deposition in another case that he no longer believed in bite mark analysis. Hayne died in 2020.
Over the past 27 years, nine 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.
Robert S. Tew, district attorney for Ouachita and Morehouse parishes, insisted in his appeal that the evidence prosecutors presented is sound, that Duncan raped and murdered 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux, and that he should be executed without delay. Tew’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Duncan’s release.
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 toddler in the bath before going 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 arrested for negligent homicide, until Hayne and West conducted Haley’s medical exam and claimed they discovered evidence she had been sexually assaulted and intentionally drowned. Hayne said he found bite marks on the girl’s body, which West then examined, claiming to find that they were a match for Duncan’s teeth.
Based in part on those findings, prosecutors upped the charge against Duncan to first-degree murder. After about two weeks of testimony in 1998, the jury found Duncan guilty and sentenced him to death. He would spend the next quarter-century in a cell on death row at Angola Prison.
During that time, however, his attorneys with the Innocence Project in New York, the Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner firm in Atlanta, and the Mwalimu Center for Justice in New Orleans uncovered a trove of evidence that eventually led to his conviction being vacated in April.
The most damning of that new evidence calls into question whether the bite marks Hayne said he found on Haley’s body were manufactured. In a video of West’s 1993 examination of Haley, which was not shown to jurors at the trial, the dentist can be seen taking a mold of Duncan’s teeth and grinding it into the girl’s body. (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.)
In his ruling vacating Duncan’s conviction, Sharp said the work Hayne and West did on Duncan’s case was “no longer valid” and “not scientifically defensible.”
Additional evidence that undermined Duncan’s conviction included testimony from an expert witness who said that the child’s death was the result not of a homicide but of an accidental drowning. And investigators working for Duncan’s legal team spoke to a jailhouse informant who recanted his earlier trial testimony that Duncan confessed to the crime.
Haley’s mother, Allison Layton Statham, has come to support Duncan’s release, telling Mississippi Today in a July interview that she believes Duncan “was falsely accused of a crime he didn’t commit.”
As the higher court weighs the state’s appeal, Sharp, who had already ruled that Duncan was factually innocent of the crime, granted him bail on Nov. 21, setting it at $150,000. In his decision, Sharp said that the “presumption is not great” that Duncan is guilty and proof against him is “not evident.” The state fought the release but lost in court, setting the stage for Duncan to be freed the day before Thanksgiving.
“When Chris got out and I went to hug him, I was very emotional,” said attorney Ann Ferebee, a member of Duncan’s legal team for the last decade who greeted him shortly after his release. “I was kind of choked up, and he asked me, ‘Are you doing OK?’
“‘Really good to see you,’ is what I told him.”
Following his release, Duncan went to live with a family member in central Louisiana. Christian Bromley, another attorney of Duncan’s, said he expects oral arguments in the state’s appeal to take place before the state Supreme Court in early 2026. Should prosecutors lose that round, they could take the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, retry Duncan on the same charges or retry him a new set of charges, Bromley said.
Or they could drop the charges altogether. But that seems unlikely, he said.
“We met Chris almost 10 years ago and have believed in his innocence, just like he has, that entire time,” Bromley said. “I think it is something that we always hoped for but knew that it was potentially an insurmountable feat to get there.”
Until this year, Louisiana had not carried out an execution since 2010 as it has been unable to procure the necessary drugs. But following Landry’s election, the state approved the use of nitrogen gas, a controversial method allowed in only three other states.
That led to the March 18 execution of Jesse Hoffman Jr. Saving Duncan from a similar fate has been “the most rewarding experience of my career,” said Ferebee, though she acknowledged that prosecutors are still pushing for the execution of Duncan. “We are celebrating this victory, but we know that there’s still more to come.”
