Louisiana's highest court frees a man after 27 years on death row over bite mark evidence

On 29 June 2026 the Supreme Court of Louisiana affirmed a lower court ruling that vacated the 1998 first degree murder conviction and death sentence of Jimmie C. Duncan, in the matter reported as State of Louisiana v. Duncan, docket 2025-KP-01014. The court held that Duncan had produced new, reliable and non cumulative evidence which, weighed against everything else, proved by clear and convincing evidence that no rational juror would have convicted him. Relief was granted under article 930.3(8) of the Louisiana Code of Criminal Procedure, the state's factual innocence provision, applying the test in article 926.2.

The case concerned the drowning of a 23 month old girl in a bathtub in West Monroe, Ouachita Parish, on 18 December 1993. Duncan, who was minding her, said she had drowned while he stepped away. The prosecution told the jury something else: that the child had been beaten, bitten, sexually assaulted and held under the water. That account rested on two men, the Mississippi forensic dentist Michael West and the pathologist Steven Hayne, who between them supplied the bite mark identification and the autopsy findings.

What the jury did not see was a video. According to the Innocence Project, which acted for Duncan, the recording shows West pressing a mould of Duncan's teeth into the dead child's skin, producing the very marks later matched to him at trial. The tape existed in 1993 and was not shown to the jury in 1998. Board certified pathologists who reviewed Hayne's work in the post conviction proceedings described the autopsy as careless and contrary to accepted practice. The Innocence Project says Hayne was performing between 1,200 and 1,300 autopsies a year, roughly five times what professional bodies treat as a safe workload.

Duncan spent 27 years on death row. Ouachita Parish District Judge Alvin Sharp held a multi day evidentiary hearing and vacated the conviction on two grounds, ineffective assistance of counsel and factual innocence. The date of that ruling is reported inconsistently: the Death Penalty Information Center puts it in April 2025, while the Innocence Project's own account dates Judge Sharp's finding that "clear and convincing evidence proves Mr. Duncan is factually innocent" to May 2025. Bail followed in the second half of that year, and the Innocence Project reported his release on 26 November 2025, more than seven months before the state's highest court ruled.

The Supreme Court reviewed for abuse of discretion, because the state did not contest legal error in the factual innocence analysis. It found none. Justice Cade Cole, writing for the court, held that the new material substantially undermined the core forensic and medical evidence the state had relied on. Chief Justice John Weimer, concurring, wrote that the post conviction laws had served their purpose of preventing the inappropriate application of the ultimate punishment.

None of this ends the case. Ouachita Parish District Attorney Robert Steve Tew has said he still regards Duncan as guilty and has signalled an intention to retry him. The Death Penalty Information Center, which published its account on 6 July 2026, has not added Duncan to its exoneration list, because prosecutors have neither dismissed the charge nor lost at a retrial. A man found factually innocent by a district court and unanimously vindicated by a state supreme court is therefore, in the counting conventions of the field, not yet an exoneree.

The forensic method at the centre of it was not a fringe technique in 1998. It was mainstream. The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology reported to the President on 20 September 2016 on the scientific validity of feature comparison methods, bitemarks among them, and called for standards capable of establishing whether such methods are valid and reliable at all. Courts had been admitting bite mark testimony for decades before anyone asked that question in public.

Australia has its own version of the aftermath problem, which is money. Kathleen Folbigg served 20 years before her convictions were quashed in 2023. On 7 August 2025 the New South Wales Attorney General announced an ex gratia payment, saying only that the decision followed thorough and extensive consideration and that, at Folbigg's request, the details would not be discussed publicly. Reported at $2 million, it drew immediate criticism from her solicitor Rhanee Rego, who called it profoundly unfair and noted that Lindy Chamberlain received $1.7 million for about three years in prison. There is no statutory entitlement in either jurisdiction. Payment is discretionary and the reasoning stays private.

What is not known is whether Louisiana will actually put Duncan on trial again, on what evidence, and before which judge. Nor is it known how many other convictions still stand on testimony from the same two experts. The Innocence Project says at least nine other wrongful convictions are attributable to them. Nobody has published a full list.