Prosecutors in Ouachita Parish have asked a state appeals court to reinstate the death sentence of Jimmie Chris Duncan, whose 27-year-old murder conviction was nullified in April after his attorneys argued that it was based in part on shoddy forensic evidence.
The West Monroe native was convicted in 1998 of killing his then-girlfriend’s daughter, but a district court ruled that Duncan was innocent. Judge Alvin Sharp, of the 4th Judicial District, overturned Duncan’s conviction, which, Sharp said, was based in part on bite mark evidence that experts now say is junk science.
As ProPublica and Verite News reported in March, the effort to secure Duncan’s freedom has become more urgent in recent months due to a renewed push by Gov. Jeff Landry to restart executions in the state following a decade-plus pause. After years in which the state was unable to secure suitable drugs for lethal injections, state lawmakers at Landry’s urging last year added nitrogen gas poisoning to the list of legally approved execution methods. In March, the state used nitrogen hypoxia to conduct its first execution since 2010.
Robert S. Tew, district attorney for Ouachita and Morehouse parishes, argued in a June 16 filing to the Second Circuit Court of Appeal that bite mark evidence was an accepted science at the time of Duncan’s trial and that some experts still consider it to be a useful forensic methodology.
Tew also defended the reputation of Dr. Stephen Hayne, who conducted the autopsy of 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux along with forensic dentist Michael West. Hayne and West determined that Haley was bitten, sexually assaulted and forcibly drowned.
The pair worked together in the 1990s and early 2000s, providing analysis and testimony in cases in Louisiana and Mississippi. But much of their work has since been discredited.
The district attorney’s office noted that Hayne, who died in 2020, served as the pathologist for the district for over a decade and during that time “there has been no cases overturned because of Dr. Hayne’s autopsy.”
This wasn’t the case in Mississippi, where Hayne and West were based for the bulk of their careers. 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, which Sharp said in his ruling appeared “questionable at best.”
Duncan was babysitting Haley at the house they shared with Haley’s mother in West Monroe on Dec. 18, 1993. He said he had left her alone in the bathtub while he washed dishes. At some point, he said he heard a loud noise from the bathroom. When he went to check on Haley, he found her floating face down in the water. She was pronounced dead a few hours later.
Though Duncan claimed Haley’s death was a tragic accident, law enforcement charged him with first-degree murder after Hayne and West examined the girl’s body and told police she was sexually assaulted and intentionally drowned. After about two weeks of testimony in 1998, the jury found Duncan guilty and sentenced him to death.
Duncan’s post-conviction attorneys later uncovered evidence that, they said, proves his innocence. This includes a jailhouse informant, Michael Cruse, who the defense claims offered testimony against Duncan in exchange for lenience, and who later recanted his testimony; previous head injuries Haley suffered that might explain her death; and a video in which West can be seen grinding a cast of Duncan’s teeth into Haley’s body. West later claimed those bite marks, which the defense says the forensic dentist manufactured, were a match for Duncan’s teeth.
“Judge Alvin Sharp found what we have always known – Mr. Duncan is an innocent man. Yet the State appears unwilling to acknowledge the facts and to take steps to rewrite this massive injustice,” Duncan’s legal team wrote in a statement Wednesday. “The fraudulent bite mark and forensic evidence used to convict him for the drowning death of Haley Oliveaux were manufactured by notorious forensic ‘experts’ Dr. Michael West and Dr. Steven Hayne, who have a storied history of wrongful convictions.”
West has previously explained the video by saying 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 because it provides the most accurate results, according to a 2020 interview with Oxygen.com.
Prosecutors stated in their recent appeal brief that Duncan’s conviction should be reinstated as Sharp erred in allowing hearsay testimony into evidence from a witness who was not available for cross-examination. That witness, Michael Lucas, told a defense investigator that he shared a cell with Cruse and that Cruse had fabricated his testimony against Duncan. The district attorney’s office also claims that Sharp was wrong in granting Duncan’s claim that he received ineffective assistance of counsel.
Duncan remains imprisoned at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, but his attorneys filed a motion for bail this week. They told the court that if prosecutors fail in their current appeal, they will almost certainly appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court, a process which could take years to complete.
“Mr. Duncan has languished on death row for twenty-seven years for an alleged crime that never happened, a prosecution made possible only through the State’s reliance on patently false ‘expert’ opinions by the discredited forensic practitioners,” his attorneys state in the filing. “Bail is a substantial step towards remedying this continued injustice.”
They included in their bail motion a letter, addressed to Landry, from Haley’s aunt in which she said she supports Dunca’s claim of innocence and his release from prison.
“Mr. Duncan is the victim of false arrest and false conviction of a heinous crime that he did not commit,” Jennifer Oliveaux Berry wrote. “Because of the disturbing work by Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West my entire family has passed thinking these horrible things happened to her by Mr. Duncan which couldn’t be further from the actual truth of how Haley passed.”
Tew’s office did not respond to requests for comment.