Ouachita DA reopens prosecution of former death row prisoner

The Ouachita Parish District Attorney’s office attempted to obtain a DNA sample last week from former death row inmate Jimmie “Chris” Duncan in an apparent effort to reopen the case against him for the 1993 death of his former girlfriend’s 23-month-old daughter, Haley Oliveaux.

Prosecutors also allegedly dispatched West Monroe Police officers to try to obtain DNA from the girl’s mother, Allison Layton Statham, while planning to exhume the girl’s body more than three decades after her death.

The district attorney’s actions, first reported by independent journalist Radley Balko, come just three months after the Louisiana Supreme Court threw out Duncan’s murder conviction. In that ruling, the justices were unsparing as they dismantled the prosecution’s case against Duncan, which was based in part on scientifically questionable — and allegedly fabricated — bite mark analysis.

Justice Cade R. Cole, writing on behalf of the seven-member court, determined that the marks found on the child’s body, the only physical evidence tying Duncan to the alleged crime, could not have been made by a human.

“It was ‘scientifically indefensible’ to identify those marks as having been made by Duncan,” Cole wrote.

Duncan’s attorneys filed an emergency motion Friday with the 4th Judicial District Court in Ouachita Parish to stop the DA’s office from enforcing its warrant for Duncan’s DNA and requested an expedited hearing.

“The District Attorney’s aggressive and rushed actions bear the hallmarks of a coordinated effort to harass Mr. Duncan, inflict additional pain on Haley’s family, and create unnecessary emotional distress for everyone connected to this case. Haley deserves to rest in peace” Duncan’s attorneys said in a statement, adding that Duncan deserves his freedom after spending decades on death row “for a crime that never occurred.”

District Attorney Steve Tew, who is leaving office in January after deciding not to run for reelection, told Duncan’s attorneys that “a new detective had been assigned to the case, that this detective submitted ‘all of the evidence’ to a crime lab in Shreveport, that this lab had found ‘something,’ and as a result, the detective obtained the warrant for Mr. Duncan’s DNA,” Duncan’s attorneys wrote in the filing.

The warrant for Duncan’s DNA was dated Sept. 16, and indicated that it was based on an affidavit submitted by Sgt. Justin Cummings of the West Monroe Police Department. Tew refused to provide Duncan’s attorneys with a copy of the affidavit and intends to file it under seal, Duncan’s attorneys wrote, but had not done so at the time the motion to stay was filed.

On the same day, according to Balko’s report, police officers showed up at Statham’s home, demanding a DNA sample and threatening to arrest her when she refused. The officers also told Statham that Tew’s office planned to exhume Haley’s remains, saying they would be sent to a Shreveport crime lab for analysis, Balko wrote. Chris Fabricant, one of Duncan’s attorneys, confirmed Balko’s reporting.

Tew did not respond to a request for comment.

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Evidence used against Duncan ‘no longer valid’

Police first arrested Duncan on Dec. 18, 1993. He was babysitting Haley Oliveaux in the home he shared with the girl’s mother, Allison Layton Statham, in West Monroe when the 23-month-old died. Duncan told law enforcement he had put the child in the bath, then went to wash dishes. When he heard a noise coming from the bathroom, he rushed to check on her and found Haley floating face down in the water. She was pronounced dead a few hours later.

Police initially booked Duncan for negligent homicide, but prosecutors upped the charge to first-degree murder after pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne and forensic dentist Michael West conducted a medical exam on Haley and claimed they discovered evidence, including the purported bite marks, that she had been sexually assaulted and intentionally drowned. Following two weeks of testimony during the trial in 1998, the jury found Duncan guilty; months later, the 30-year-old was sentenced to death.

Nearly two decades later, Duncan’s legal team unearthed a trove of new evidence that pointed to his innocence. This included expert witnesses who said the child’s death was an accidental drowning brought on by a seizure and a jailhouse informant who recanted his trial testimony that Duncan had confessed to the crime. They also pointed to the current consensus on bite mark matching analysis. Though a fairly common forensic technique at the time of Duncan’s 1998 trial, bite mark matching is now considered by experts to be junk science.

But perhaps most important was a recording of West’s 1993 examination of Haley. In that grainy black-and-white video, West can be seen taking a mold of Duncan’s teeth and grinding it into and across the girl’s body. Duncan’s attorneys have alleged that he appeared to be creating bite marks where none previously existed.Those same marks were later used to secure a death sentence against Duncan. The trial judge had not allowed the jury to see the video on the grounds that it was not an indication of Duncan’s innocence.

West, who has not responded to multiple earlier requests for comment, had 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. He admitted in a 2011 deposition in another case that he no longer believed in bite mark analysis. Hayne died in 2020.

In the 28 years since Duncan’s trial, nine other prisoners have been set free after being convicted in part on inaccurate evidence given by West and Hayne. Three of those men were on death row. Duncan was the last person awaiting an execution based on the pair’s work, before his November release on bail.

At the time of Haley’s death, law enforcement collected blood and urine samples from Duncan and tested them against evidence collected in a sexual assault kit taken from the scene and Haley’s body, according to his attorneys’ new motion. There was no semen found on the child or any of the collected items, the filing states.

Duncan’s attorneys later filed a records request to obtain the sexual assault kit, but the police department said “neither the Coroner’s Office, nor the District Attorney’s Office ha[d] possession of the rape kit or [knew] where it might be located.”

The motion also cites Detective Chris Sasser, who investigated Haley’s death. Sasser previously said there was “no blood, no signs of struggle, no cleaning rags and no cleaning agents” in the bathroom or house where the alleged crime occurred.

Judge Alvin Sharp of the 4th Judicial District in Ouachita Parish overturned Duncan’s conviction in April 2025, citing  testimony that the bite mark analysis used to convict Duncan is “no longer valid” and calling into question the qualifications and expertise of Hayne and West. Sharp’s ruling came after a Verite News and ProPublica investigation examined the reliability of the evidence used to convict him. The DA’s office appealed the decision.

At Duncan’s bail hearing last July, Statham told the court that the district attorney’s office had lied about her daughter’s death to make it look like murder and continues to perpetuate the lie. She said Duncan deserved to be free.

Statham could not be reached for comment.

Four months later, Sharp granted Duncan bail. He was released into the embrace of his family the day before Thanksgiving. Then, this June, the state Supreme Court rejected the district attorney’s appeal and threw out Duncan’s conviction.

In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice John Weimer was so outraged by the case that he compared Duncan’s prosecution, and its use of faulty forensic techniques,  to 17th-century witch trials. “We now look back at those practices as asinine and absurd” with “no basis whatsoever in logic,” he wrote. Some of the evidence against Duncan, he said, was “similarly specious.”

During oral arguments before the court in April, Tew told the justices that should they overturn Duncan’s conviction, he had every intention of retrying him. Tew said that since Duncan was the only person with Haley at the time of her death, his guilt could not be debated.

“We don’t need the bite mark evidence to put Mr. Duncan in the apartment alone with this child,” Tew said.

This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.