A photo of Jimmie Duncan, center, with his family and friends during a visit at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. In the second image, a younger Duncan is pictured with his parents, Sharon and Bennie. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)
Longtime death row prisoner Jimmie Duncan, whose 27-year-old murder conviction was vacated this spring, will have to wait a few more days to find out if he will be able to walk out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. After a three-day hearing on whether to release Duncan, a Ouachita Parish judge said Thursday that he will not rule until Monday at the earliest.
In April, Judge Alvin Sharp set aside Duncan’s 1998 conviction for murdering 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux, his then-girlfriend’s daughter. Sharp agreed with Duncan’s attorneys that an analysis performed on the girl that purported to match marks on her body to Duncan’s teeth — a key piece of evidence in the trial — was based on discredited 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.
Attorney Scott Greene, who is part of Duncan’s legal team, said during the hearing that Duncan has “enormous support” from his family, the community and Haley’s mother, Allison Layton Statham. Now that his conviction has been vacated, Greene argued, Duncan should be freed on bail pending another trial.
This week’s hearing on that request began Tuesday and continued until Thursday afternoon. It descended into chaos on Wednesday as prosecutors grilled Statham, who supports Duncan’s release.
At one point during a tense back-and-forth with Ouachita Parish Assistant District Attorney Michael Ruddick, Statham asked what became of Dr. Steven Hayne. Hayne, who died in 2020, was half of the team that was responsible for the bite mark analysis. Ruddick replied that Hayne was in the same place as her daughter — “six feet under the ground,” drawing shouts of outrage from the audience.
The Ouachita DA’s office maintains that Duncan is guilty of raping and murdering Haley in 1993. The office has appealed the April ruling setting aside Duncan’s conviction. Ruddick urged Sharp to keep Duncan locked up pending the outcome of the appeal. Prosecutors have argued that Duncan is “a safety risk to not only the victim’s family, but also the general public.” Early in the hearing, Ruddick unsuccessfully moved for Sharp to recuse himself, arguing that his earlier ruling nullifying Duncan’s conviction made him biased and unfit to decide whether or not to grant him bail.
Duncan’s attorneys, however, cast him as a law-abiding man who had been railroaded by the legal system. Prior to his now-vacated murder conviction, Duncan had never previously been convicted of a crime, noted attorney Chris Fabricant with the Innocence Project. What’s more, Fabricant said, the child’s family, including her mother, support Duncan’s release.
In an interview published earlier this month, Statham told Mississippi Today that she believes Duncan “was falsely accused of a crime he didn’t commit.”
“I loved him,” Statham said from the stand.
‘Not scientifically defensible’
Duncan was babysitting Haley in West Monroe on Dec. 18, 1993 when, he said, he heard a noise coming from the bathroom, where the toddler was taking a bath. When he went to check on her, he found her floating face down in the water. She was pronounced dead a few hours later.
Hayne, a pathologist who worked on hundreds of criminal cases in Mississippi and Louisiana over his decades-long career, conducted Haley’s medical exam. He claimed he found evidence that she was sexually assaulted and intentionally drowned.
He also claimed to find bite marks on the girl. Michael West, a forensic dentist who worked with Hayne in a number of cases in the 1990s and early 2000s, analyzed the marks and found that they were a match for Duncan’s teeth.
Based in part on those findings, Duncan was charged with first-degree murder. After about two weeks of testimony in 1998, the jury found Duncan guilty and sentenced him to death.
But a team of post-conviction attorneys later uncovered evidence that, they say, proves his innocence.
The most effective arguments concerned Hayne and West’s bite mark evidence. The type of analysis West performed — matching a suspect’s teeth to purported bite marks — while frequently used in criminal cases at the time of Duncan’s trial, has since been widely discredited and dismissed by experts as “junk science.”
Duncan’s attorneys also questioned whether the supposed “bite marks” were even bite marks at all. In a video of West’s 1993 examination of Haley — which was not shown to jurors at the trial — West 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 April 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.”
Robert Tew, district attorney for Ouachita and Morehouse parishes, argued in a June 16 filing 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. He also 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.”
Over the past 27 years, nine prisoners have been set free after being convicted in part on inaccurate evidence given by West and Hayne. Seven of those convictions had involved bite mark identification analysis, a discipline that has been called into question. And three of the freed men had been sentenced to die.
‘My daughter is in heaven’
Throughout the hearing, the small courtroom was filled with Duncan’s supporters, including family members, a community pastor and Sen. Katrina Jackson, D-Monroe, who said she came to support Duncan’s release on bail. Also in the court was Detective Chris Sasser, who originally investigated the case in 1993.
Duncan was brought into court this week with his feet shackled, a chain around his waist connected to a pair of handcuffs that kept his wrists flush to his stomach. He wore an orange prison jumpsuit that was faded yellow in various spots. The sides of his head were shaved and his dark, dreadlocked hair pulled back into a ponytail.
Duncan’s attorneys made the case that he was not a danger to the public. They told the court that Duncan had never been arrested prior to 1993, that he didn’t have a history of violence, and that he had a clean disciplinary history in prison for more than 20 years. They also read a letter of support from a death row corrections officer, and noted that Duncan tutored his fellow death row inmates, helping at least 17 achieve their GEDs.
Fabricant argued that the state’s odds of convincing a jury a second time that Duncan is guilty are basically nonexistent given the new evidence, science and testimony they would be able to produce that was not available or allowed at the first trial.
Along with insisting that Duncan is guilty of murder and therefore a danger to the public, Ruddick also argued that Landry’s recent push to restart executions in the state could turn Duncan into a flight risk. If state appeals court judges side with the DA’s office and overturn Sharp’s April order vacating Duncan’s conviction, Ruddick said, then Duncan, fearing his execution is imminent, might flee.
“I’m gone,” Ruddick said, imagining what Duncan would be thinking.
Tension in the courtroom boiled over Wednesday when Ruddick called on Haley’s mother to testify. Statham had stepped out of the courtroom that afternoon as she was growing increasingly agitated.
Sharp sent several deputies outside to bring her back. Statham was visibly upset as they walked her through the hallway back into the courtroom, loudly complaining that Ruddick only wanted her to testify so he could harass her. Statham took the stand as five deputies positioned themselves in front of the door and on either side of the bench.
Staring directly at Ruddick, Statham said she has waited 30 years to look him in the eye and tell him that her daughter wasn’t killed. Haley was sick and died in a tragic accident, she said, and the DA’s office lied to make it look like murder.
She then brought up Hayne, the pathologist from Mississippi, saying it was wrong for the district attorney to bring in a doctor with such a questionable history to conduct her daughter’s autopsy.
“Where is he now?” she asked Ruddick, referring to Hayne, who died in 2020.
“He’s in the same place your daughter is,” Ruddick snapped back, “six feet under the ground.”
The audience erupted. People shouted at Ruddick while others gasped in shock. Statham stood and yelled at Ruddick that he was “sick” and that his lies have caused her family and Duncan’s nothing but pain and misery for decades.
Then she said of Hayne: “He’s in hell for what he did. My daughter is in heaven.”
Throughout Statham’s testimony, Duncan wept as his attorneys attempted to console him.
Tew’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
The next day in court, Ruddick apologized to the judge, the defense team, and those in the audience who witnessed his interaction with Statham. When prompted by Sharp, he also apologized specifically to Statham.
Closing the hearing on Thursday, Sharp gave both the prosecution and defense until 10 p.m. Sunday to submit any additional materials before he renders a decision.
SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
