After 27 Years on Death Row, Louisiana Says Jimmie Duncan Is Innocent

Twenty-seven years is not a sentence. It is a life taken in installments — birthdays missed, parents buried, ordinary Tuesdays disappeared inside a cell — while the state prepared to kill you for something you did not do. That is how long Jimmie "Chris" Duncan wrongly spent on death row in Louisiana before he walked free, according to the Innocence Project ¹¹. Other accounts describe the stretch only as nearly three decades ³⁵, a vaguer phrase that lands the same way: an entire adult life was consumed before the courts admitted the foundation had collapsed.

On June 29, 2026, the Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed a lower court's ruling vacating Duncan's 1998 first-degree murder conviction and finding him factually innocent ⁶⁸¹¹. The order grants relief under La. C.Cr.P. Art. 930.3(8) in docket 2025-KP-01014 from the Parish of Ouachita ⁶⁷. The opinion was authored by Justice Cole ⁶⁷⁸¹¹. Chief Justice Weimer and Justice McCallum additionally concurred with separate reasons ⁶⁷.

The case began with the death of a toddler entrusted to his care. The child was Haley Oliveaux, 23 months old ⁵⁹¹⁰. Duncan was caring for his then-girlfriend's daughter when she died ⁹¹⁰. The West Monroe man was later convicted of first-degree murder and sent to death row ⁹¹⁰. The name and age matter because early retellings got them wrong, and in a case built on supposed forensic certainty, getting the basic facts right is the least the record owes both the living and the dead.

That 1998 conviction rested, in part, on bite mark evidence now widely regarded as junk science ². At trial, dental testimony presented for the prosecution purported to link Duncan to marks on the child's body. Decades later, the state's highest court called that kind of bite mark evidence "scientifically indefensible" ². The phrase matters because it does not say mistaken or outdated. It says the method was never reliable enough to help send a man to death row in the first place.

A videotape helped undo it. NBC News obtained what it described as "never-before-broadcast video of discredited bite mark evidence used against him at trial" ³. The network's exclusive investigation was led by Dan Slepian ³. ProPublica's subsequent account framed the outcome bluntly as Louisiana freeing death row prisoner Jimmie Duncan ². The throughline across the reporting is consistent: once the bite mark work could be seen for what it was, the conviction could not stand ²³.

What the video proved in court is narrower than legend now suggests. The available reporting confirms the tape was central to freeing Duncan, but none of the source excerpts provided to this newsroom confirms precisely what the dentist was shown doing on that tape, frame by frame ³¹⁰. That restraint is important. This exoneration does not need embellishment. The documented record — a conviction built in part on discredited odontological comparison, then vacated and replaced with a factual innocence finding — is damning enough without adding details the files do not support.

Vacatur alone ends the punishment. A finding of factual innocence does something rarer. It says the state did not merely fail to prove its case cleanly; it convicted the wrong person. Here the high court affirmed the lower court's factual innocence finding ⁸. The Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks capital cases, confirms only that core result — that the court affirmed the vacatur and factual innocence finding for the former death-sentenced man ⁸. The court's formal disposition reads: "AFFIRMED. RELIEF GRANTED UNDER LA.C.CR.P. ART. 930.3(8)." ⁶⁷.

In New Orleans on June 29, 2026, the Innocence Project said Duncan finally received justice from the courts after spending 27 years wrongfully imprisoned on death row ¹¹. The organization says he "wrongly spent 27 years" there ⁵¹¹. He walked free on the Wednesday after the ruling after nearly three decades on death row ⁵¹¹. The photograph that accompanied the announcement was credited to Jamal Barnes ⁸¹¹.

It is tempting to treat bite mark comparison as a relic, a 1990s mistake we have outgrown. That would be comforting and false. For years, jurors were told that teeth leave signatures as individual as fingerprints, and that a dentist with a mold and a photograph could read them. The Duncan case shows how that confidence worked in practice: an expert's certainty stood in for proof, and proof became a death sentence. The Louisiana Supreme Court has now said that emperor had no clothes, calling the evidence "scientifically indefensible" ².

The death penalty makes that kind of error uniquely unforgivable because it leaves no margin for correction. Twenty-seven years allows for lawyers, videotapes, and evolving science to intervene. An execution does not. Louisiana did not execute an innocent man here, but only because time, journalism, and post-conviction litigation ran faster than the execution chamber. That is luck, not design, and a system that depends on luck to avoid killing the innocent is not a system that can reassure anyone.