Former Louisiana death row inmate Jimmy “Chris” Duncan is officially free following a unanimous decision Monday by the Louisiana Supreme Court. In the opinion, the justices upheld a lower court’s decision to throw out Duncan’s 1998 conviction for killing his ex-girlfriend’s infant daughter, Haley Oliveau, because of flaws in the forensic procedures used to convict him.
Judge Cade R. Cole, speaking for a seven-member court, wrote that the new evidence presented by Mr. Duncan’s defense team left no doubt that Mr. Duncan’s conviction should be overturned.
“The post-conviction evidence undermined the core factual premises on which the state relied,” Cole said in his official opinion.
Two other justices, including Chief Justice John Weimer, issued opinions concurring with Cole.
“We are filled with relief,” Chris Fabricant, a member of Mr. Duncan’s legal team and director of strategic litigation at the Innocence Project in New York, said in an interview. “It would be morally outrageous for the conviction to be reinstated.”
The court’s decision came after a 2025 Vérité News and ProPublica investigation examined the reliability of key forensic evidence used to convict Duncan, now 57. At the time, Duncan faced the possibility of the death penalty after Gov. Jeff Landry, a staunch death penalty advocate, moved to expedite the execution after a 15-year moratorium.
Duncan’s conviction was based primarily on now discredited bite mark evidence provided by forensic dentist Michael West and pathologist Stephen Hayne. Their analysis was key to Ouachita Parish prosecutors’ confirmation of Duncan’s conviction, arguing that marks on Haley’s body matched Duncan’s teeth.
But experts have since dismissed such evidence, which was fairly common at the time of the 1998 Duncan trial, as junk science. Meanwhile, Mr. West and Mr. Hayne’s long-standing partnership has come under intense scrutiny from civil rights lawyers, forensic experts and courts over concerns about the effectiveness of the technology.
In the 28 years since Duncan’s trial, nine other prisoners have been released, convicted in part because of inaccurate evidence presented by West and Hayne. Three of them were on death row. Duncan was the last person awaiting the death penalty based on their research.
Mr. Cole’s opinion reconsidered the use of the only physical evidence linking Mr. Duncan to the crime charges, the alleged bite marks. Cole pointed to a video of West questioning Haley in 1993, which was not shown to the jury at trial. In the recording, West can be seen taking impressions of Duncan’s teeth and grinding them into and across the girl’s body, creating bite marks where none existed before. “Identifying these marks as those made by Duncan is ‘scientifically indefensible,’ and the angles shown in the West video were physically impossible for a human bite,” Cole wrote, citing previous testimony from defense experts.
West previously said he was simply using what he called a “direct comparison.” The method involves pressing a mold of a human tooth directly onto the suspected bite mark.
Weimer wrote in the consent document that the bite mark evidence used to prosecute Duncan was similar to the “water trial” tests used in 17th-century witch hunts, in which suspected witches were tied with ropes and lowered into bodies of water. Those who floated were considered guilty of witchcraft, and those who sank and “passed” the test were often drowned.
“We now look back on these practices as outrageous and absurd, because the victims of these practices, whether guilty or innocent, often did not survive,” Weimer wrote. “The bite mark evidence and sexual abuse evidence used in the trial against the defendant were found to be equally questionable.”
Duncan’s prosecution “demonstrates that we cannot be too cautious in deciding whether to carry out the death penalty in cases like this one, because the verdict is final and irreversible,” Weimer wrote. “These irreversible and tragic consequences are harmful and detrimental to our nation’s justice system if the death penalty is carried out on the basis of unwarranted evidence.”
“This should be the end of this incident.”
Police arrested Duncan on December 18, 1993. Duncan was babysitting Haley that day at the West Monroe home he shared with the girl’s mother. Duncan told police she gave her child a bath and then went downstairs to wash the dishes. Hearing noises coming from the bathroom, he rushed upstairs to check on Haley and found her floating face down in the water. She was pronounced dead several hours later.
Duncan was initially charged with negligent homicide, but prosecutors upgraded the charge to first-degree murder after Hayne and West conducted a medical examination on Haley and said they found bite marks and other evidence that Haley had been sexually assaulted and intentionally drowned. After two weeks of testimony at his 1998 trial, a jury found Duncan guilty and sentenced him to death.
As Duncan awaited his execution date, his new post-conviction legal team discovered evidence of his innocence, including an expert witness who said the child’s death was the result of accidental drowning, not murder. Additionally, investigators from Duncan’s defense team interviewed a prison informant who recanted earlier trial testimony that Duncan had confessed to the crime.
Duncan’s conviction was overturned last April by former Ouachita Parish Judge Alvin Sharp. He was released on bail in December, but continued to await a final verdict in the case after prosecutors appealed Sharpe’s ruling.
Steve Tew, the district attorney for Ouachita and Morehouse parishes, has never wavered in his assertion that Duncan is guilty of murder and should receive the death penalty. His office appealed Sharp’s decision to the state Supreme Court.
During oral arguments in April, Tew said he could not debate Mr. Duncan’s guilt because Mr. Duncan was the only person with Mr. Haley at the time of her death. “We don’t need bite mark evidence to put Mr. Duncan alone in the apartment with this child,” Tew said.
Haley’s mother, Allison Leighton Statham, has publicly supported Duncan’s release and overturning his conviction. So is the family of Haley’s father, Lloyd Donald Oliveau, who died in 1996. They blame the state’s tactics, claiming they have repeatedly requested to meet with prosecutors to express their concerns but have never received a response.
Mr. Chu, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday, said at a hearing in April that he would retry Mr. Duncan’s case if the Supreme Court refused to reinstate his conviction, but he did not say what charges he would pursue.
Asked about the possibility of Duncan being retried for murder, Fabricant, an attorney with the Innocence Project, said: “If there’s 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 Justice Center in New Orleans and the law firm of Brian Cave Leighton Paisner in Atlanta.
