\n<\/p>\n
Jimmie \u201cChris\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Seven months ago, a Louisiana district court judge vacated his murder conviction for killing his former girlfriend\u2019s 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 \u2014 then celebrated his 57th birthday the next day.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe thank God for Jimmie coming home,\u201d Duncan\u2019s stepmom, Sharon Duncan, said in an emailed statement on behalf of the family.<\/p>\n
But Duncan\u2019s journey to freedom is far from over. Prosecutors have asked the state Supreme Court to reinstate his death sentence. Duncan\u2019s attorneys declined to make him immediately available for an interview.<\/p>\n
The April decision by Judge Alvin Sharp to set aside Duncan\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Sharp, of the 4th Judicial District in Ouachita Parish, found that Duncan\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s work.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Duncan\u2019s release.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Police arrested Duncan on Dec. 18, 1993. He was babysitting Haley that day in the home he shared with the girl\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Duncan was initially arrested for negligent homicide, until Hayne and West conducted Haley\u2019s medical exam and claimed they discovered evidence she had been sexually assaulted and intentionally drowned. Hayne said he found bite marks on the girl\u2019s body,\u00a0 which West then examined, claiming to find that they were a match for Duncan\u2019s teeth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The most damning of that new evidence calls into question whether the bite marks Hayne said he found on Haley\u2019s body were manufactured. In a video of West\u2019s 1993 examination of Haley, which was not shown to jurors at the trial, the dentist can be seen taking a mold of Duncan\u2019s teeth and grinding it into the girl\u2019s body. (West has previously said he was simply using what he called a \u201cdirect comparison\u201d technique \u2014 in which he presses a mold of a person\u2019s teeth directly onto the location of suspected bite marks.)<\/p>\n
In his ruling vacating Duncan\u2019s conviction, Sharp said the work Hayne and West did on Duncan\u2019s case was \u201cno longer valid\u201d and \u201cnot scientifically defensible.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Additional evidence that undermined Duncan\u2019s conviction included testimony from an expert witness who said that the child\u2019s death was the result not of a homicide but of an accidental drowning. And investigators working for Duncan\u2019s legal team spoke to a jailhouse informant who recanted his earlier trial testimony that Duncan confessed to the crime.<\/p>\n
Haley\u2019s mother, Allison Layton Statham, has come to support Duncan\u2019s release, telling Mississippi Today in a July interview that she believes Duncan \u201cwas falsely accused of a crime he didn\u2019t commit.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
As the higher court weighs the state\u2019s 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 \u201cpresumption is not great\u201d that Duncan is guilty and proof against him is \u201cnot evident.\u201d The state fought the release but lost in court, setting the stage for Duncan to be freed the day before Thanksgiving.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen Chris got out and I went to hug him, I was very emotional,\u201d said attorney Ann Ferebee, a member of Duncan\u2019s legal team for the last decade who greeted him shortly after his release. \u201cI was kind of choked up, and he asked me, \u2018Are you doing OK?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018Really good to see you,\u2019 is what I told him.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Following his release, Duncan went to live with a family member in central Louisiana. Christian Bromley, another attorney of Duncan\u2019s, said he expects oral arguments in the state\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Or they could drop the charges altogether. But that seems unlikely, he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe met Chris almost 10 years ago and have believed in his innocence, just like he has, that entire time,\u201d Bromley said. \u201cI think it is something that we always hoped for but knew that it was potentially an insurmountable feat to get there.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s election, the state approved the use of nitrogen gas, a controversial method allowed in only three other states.<\/p>\n
That led to the March 18 execution of Jesse Hoffman Jr. Saving Duncan from a similar fate has been \u201cthe most rewarding experience of my career,\u201d said Ferebee, though she acknowledged that prosecutors are still pushing for the execution of Duncan. \u201cWe are celebrating this victory, but we know that there\u2019s still more to come.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jimmie \u201cChris\u201d 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.\u00a0 Seven months ago, a Louisiana district court judge vacated his murder conviction for killing his former girlfriend\u2019s toddler, citing doubts about the evidence used to convict<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[9783,376,20141,19082,584,7000,20140,848,247,958,1834],"class_list":{"0":"post-35868","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-bail","9":"tag-death","10":"tag-duncan","11":"tag-execution","12":"tag-face","13":"tag-inmate","14":"tag-jimmie","15":"tag-louisiana","16":"tag-propublica","17":"tag-released","18":"tag-row"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}