By James Finn
The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate
NEW ORLEANS — Louisiana’s Supreme Court on Monday affirmed a lower court decision overturning a Ouachita Parish man’s death sentence, ruling that the man’s conviction 28 years ago rested on discredited science that “no rational juror” would use to reach a guilty verdict today.
The 33-page high court ruling in favor of former death row prisoner Jimmie “Chris” Duncan represents a potential landmark victory for supporters of a post-conviction law Louisiana approved in 2021. The law sought to give prisoners who obtain fresh evidence of their innocence easier paths to jettisoning unjust sentences.
Penned by Justice Cade Cole, the ruling excoriates state prosecutors’ use of “bite mark analysis” during Duncan’s 1998 trial, which ended with Duncan’s conviction on first-degree murder for the death of his former girlfriend’s 23-month-old daughter, Haley Oliveaux.
A district court judge in north Louisiana, Alvin Sharp, vacated Duncan’s sentence last May after finding there were “not sufficient grounds” to have prosecuted him for first degree murder. Duncan was freed on bond in November after 27 years on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
Prosecutors from the Fourth Judicial District Attorney’s Office asked the Louisiana Supreme Court to reinstate Duncan’s capital sentence. But the high court’s decision Monday, which came in response to that request, broadly affirms Sharp’s order.
Duncan proved “by clear and convincing evidence that no rational juror would have found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of first degree murder had the new evidence been presented at trial,” Cole wrote.
Duncan admits to leaving Oliveaux in a bathtub the morning she died, but has denied any other role in her death.
“An innocent man, Mr. Duncan endured unimaginable trauma from a deeply flawed conviction built largely on unreliable forensic evidence and expert testimony that has now been thoroughly discredited and undermined,” said Duncan’s legal team in a statement. He was represented by lawyers from the Innocence Project, the Mwalimu Center for Justice and Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP.
“Although nothing can restore the decades stolen from Mr. Duncan, this ruling provides some brief solace for Mr. Duncan, his family and friends,” his lawyers added.
Fourth Judicial District Attorney Robert “Steve” Tew did not respond to a phone message Monday.
Chief Supreme Court Justice John Weimer in a concurrence to Cole’s ruling likened the use of bite mark analysis to “trial by water” — a pre-Enlightenment practice of binding and throwing accused witches into lakes to see whether they had demonic powers that would enable them to float.
“We now look back at those practices as asinine and absurd,” Weimer wrote.
Duncan’s victory before the state Supreme Court comes a little more than a year since Louisiana used nitrogen gas to perform its first execution in 15 years, part of a push by Gov. Jeff Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill to hasten the pace of executions in the state.
Duncan’s case, Weimer wrote in his concurrence, “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.”
“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,” he wrote. “The laws of post-conviction relief have served the purpose of preventing the inappropriate application of the ultimate punishment.”
The “bite mark” analysis prosecutors used to convict Duncan during his trial came under scrutiny following investigations by several news outlets into the practice, which forensic experts have increasingly recognized as based on shoddy science.
After responding to the scene of Oliveaux’s death at Duncan and his then-girlfriend’s West Monroe apartment, authorities sent the little girl’s body to Jackson, Mississippi for forensic examination by pathologist Steven Hayne. Hayne told detectives he observed bite marks on her body, a claim he supported by consulting an odontologist, Michael West .
West and Hayne have since been widely discredited and sanctioned by various medical boards. The Supreme Court’s ruling noted West was captured on video pushing a mold of Duncan’s teeth onto Oliveaux’s body — a method only he was known to have used, according to experts cited in the order, and one that destroyed evidence and “created marks” on Oliveaux’s skin.
Duncan is the tenth death row prisoner freed in part due to the two doctors’ now-discredited testimony, according to the news services and the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. Hayne had also determined that Oliveaux suffered sexual assault and died from forcible drowning, which multiple other experts later refuted.
Duncan’s attorneys noted in their statement Monday that Tew, the district attorney in Ouachita Parish , has promised to retry their client.
“If Mr. Tew chooses to pursue a new trial, our team will continue to stand alongside Mr. Duncan and will not stop pressing forward until he is fully and completely exonerated,” they said.
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