A Louisiana man who spent 27 years on death row has been granted bail after his murder conviction was overturned.
Jimmie Duncan was convicted of first-degree murder in 1998 in connection with the death of his girlfriend’s 23-month-old daughter, Haley Oliveaux, the Associated Press (AP) reported. He was accused of raping the infant and then drowning her in a bathtub, per AP.
His release follows a ruling last spring by Fourth Judicial District Court Judge Alvin Sharp, who found that key forensic evidence presented at trial — including bite mark analysis — was “not scientifically defensible,” according to AP. Sharp further concluded that the child’s death appeared to be the result of an accidental drowning, per AP.
“The presumption is not great that he is guilty,” Judge Sharp wrote on Friday, Nov. 21, citing new evidence presented at an evidentiary hearing last year, per AP.
“Mr. Duncan’s release marks a significant step forward in his decades-long fight for justice — but the fight is not over,” said Chris Fabricant, Duncan’s Innocence Project attorney, in a press release. “Mr. Duncan’s incarceration was a gross miscarriage of justice — his execution would have been a moral outrage.”
According to an Innocence Project press release, the charge against Duncan “was based entirely on junk science.” The press release states that jurors in the 1990s never saw “the stark evidence of forensic fraud, including a videotape of Dr. [Michael] West using a mold of Mr. Duncan’s teeth to create the ‘bite marks’ on Haley’s body that were ‘matched’ to Mr. Duncan at trial.”
During a bail hearing last week, the child’s mother, Allison Layton Statham, told the judge that she now believes her daughter — who suffered from seizures — “wasn’t killed” but instead accidentally drowned in the bathtub, Fox News reported. Her daughter died “because she was sick,” she said, per Fox News.
“The horror story that they put out and desecrated my baby’s memory makes me infuriated,” Statham said, per AP. “I was not informed of anything that would have exonerated Mr. Duncan at all. Had I been then, things would have turned out a lot different for Mr. Duncan and all of our families.”
According to the Innocence Project, Hailey had experienced a series of seizures and head injuries in the weeks before her 1993 death, requiring hospitalization.
Prosecutors are currently seeking to reinstate Duncan’s conviction, according to Fox News. They could not be reached for comment.
Duncan was one of 55 people on Louisiana’s death row, per AP. He has now been released on a $150,000 bond, according to KLFY.
