This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
Reporting Highlights
- Discredited Testimony: Nine prisoners who were convicted in part on inaccurate evidence presented by dentist Michael West and pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne have since been exonerated.
- Junk Science: Jimmie Chris Duncan was sentenced to death row for killing his girlfriend’s toddler after allegedly manufactured bite mark evidence connected him to the crime.
- Suppressed Evidence: Prosecutors did not reveal that a critical witness had written them a letter from jail in which he appeared to offer his assistance in exchange for leniency.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
Attorney Scott Greene warned those present in a Louisiana courtroom last September that the video they were about to see was disturbing. Created as part of a murder investigation, the 1993 tape showed a dentist repeatedly grinding a dental mold of the suspect’s teeth into the face and arm of a dead toddler during a post-mortem examination.
Those marks, which prosecutors decades ago had told jurors came from the suspect, were critical evidence in convicting Jimmie Chris Duncan, who has spent the past 27 years on death row for the killing of his girlfriend’s daughter. They were also a fraud, Greene argued at the appeals hearing.
Nine other prisoners have walked free after being convicted in part on inaccurate evidence presented by Michael West, the dentist, or his pathologist partner, Dr. Steven Hayne, once stars of the Mississippi forensics field. 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.
There is only one person who still awaits an execution date based on evidence produced by the pair: Duncan.
Since his 1998 conviction, Duncan has maintained his innocence. Now, with a tough-on-crime Republican governor in office, he faces the very real threat of being put to death as Louisiana is slated to resume executions after a 15-year pause, with the first scheduled for March 18.
Louisiana has a long record of convicting and sentencing to death people later found to be innocent. In the past three decades, the state has exonerated 11 people facing execution, among the highest such numbers in the country, according to The National Registry of Exonerations.
Prosecutorial misconduct such as withholding evidence accounted for about 60% of wrongful convictions in Louisiana, nearly twice the national average, according to the registry.
And yet, upon taking office last year, Gov. Jeff Landry, a staunch death penalty advocate, has attempted to expedite executions. Louisiana has not put anyone to death since 2010 because of the unavailability of execution drugs. Landry recently approved the use of nitrogen gas, a controversial method allowed in only three other states.
“For too long, Louisiana has failed to uphold the promises made to victims of our State’s most violent crimes,” Landry said in a February news release. “The time for broken promises has ended; we will carry out these sentences and justice will be dispensed.”
Louisiana prosecutors say they have no doubt Duncan is guilty and insist he be put to death without delay. In a Jan. 9 brief, they acknowledged questions surrounding the credibility of bite mark analysis but said there is no consensus on whether it is junk science. They also downplayed the importance of the evidence presented by the dentist, saying it was not needed to connect Duncan to the crime scene, despite his defense team’s argument that it was the only physical evidence linking Duncan to the child’s death.
This is the purest manifestation of the harm of junk science, bad lawyering and pro-prosecution bias that one can imagine.
Robert S. Tew, district attorney for Louisiana’s 4th Judicial District, and Michael Ruddick, the lead prosecutor in the case, declined through a spokesperson to be interviewed, citing the case’s ongoing nature. Neither answered follow-up questions about allegations of prosecutorial misconduct or of West manufacturing the bite marks.
In Duncan’s original trial, the video of the dentist’s post-mortem examination was never shown in court. Nor did prosecutors show it to their own expert testifying in the case. And yet, they used photographs of the bite mark evidence prepared by West even though they chose not to put him on the witness stand because he had been temporarily suspended by a professional board for a pattern of errors.
As defense expert Dr. Lowell Levine watched the video during last year’s hearing as part of Duncan’s post-conviction appeal, he recoiled.
“It’s a fraud, simply put,” Levine, former president of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, said from the witness stand.
The bite marks are not the only evidence in Duncan’s case that has been cast into doubt by the defense team. A jailhouse informant who claimed Duncan confessed to the crime has since recanted his testimony. And in what Duncan’s current attorneys described in a 2022 court filing as a “bizarre, one-sided” deal, prosecutors and Duncan’s previous defense team had agreed not to present evidence at his original trial that his current team says indicates the child could have died due to a seizure caused by prior head injuries.
In a January court filing, Ruddick dismissed all the new evidence presented by Duncan’s current defense team, accusing it of “throwing another handful of spaghetti on the wall to see if anything can stick.” He wrote that the video of West does not show what the defense claims and said the dentist was simply doing his job.
West did not respond to emailed requests for an interview or questions about the case that were hand-delivered to his Mississippi home.
In a 2023 interview with The New Republic, however, West said that while he believes Duncan is guilty, he does not believe he should be executed. “You can be 99.9999999%, but you will never be 100%,” he said, adding, “It is a lot easier to get you out of jail than it is to get you out of the cemetery.”
Duncan’s fate now rests in the hands of a judge, who is expected to issue a ruling on his appeal in the coming months. The court can either grant Duncan a new trial or decide that his original verdict stands. Duncan’s defense team would not grant Verite News and ProPublica an interview with him.
“This is the purest manifestation of the harm of junk science, bad lawyering and pro-prosecution bias that one can imagine,” said attorney Chris Fabricant with the Innocence Project in New York, who is part of Duncan’s legal team.
He said moving forward with Duncan’s execution would not amount to justice, as Landry purports; it would be murder.
The Original Charge: Negligent Homicide
On Dec. 18, 1993, Detective Chris Sasser pressed record on a tape deck as he sat across from Duncan at the West Monroe Police Department headquarters. Haley Oliveaux had been pronounced dead just three hours earlier. In a clipped Southern drawl, the 13-year veteran officer instructed Duncan to “tell us exactly what happened.”
The 25-year-old sniffled and breathed deeply, then spoke, his voice barely above a whisper: “I got up this morning and I fed the baby. …”
At the time of Haley’s death, Duncan was living with Haley’s mother, Allison Oliveaux, in West Monroe, a struggling town about 280 miles northwest of New Orleans. Duncan’s father, Bennie, described the couple’s relationship as strained but said his son adored Haley, even though he wasn’t her father. “If the baby got sick, he was the one carrying her to the doctor,” Bennie said.
On the morning Haley died, Oliveaux left for work around 8:30, Duncan said. He got the toddler out of bed, fed her oatmeal, then left her in the bathtub while he washed dishes. At some point, Duncan said, he heard a loud noise.
“I thought I heard her splashing in the tub. I thought she was just playing,” he told Sasser, his voice starting to quiver. “I went in there and she was face down in the tub.”
Duncan said he yanked the 23-month-old girl out of the bathwater and attempted CPR. She spit up oatmeal but didn’t regain consciousness. “I was shaking her, holding her and just shaking her as much as I could,” he told the detective.
He ran next door with Haley, screaming for help. His neighbors also tried CPR without success. Someone called 911. Paramedics arrived and failed to revive the girl.
“Nobody could wake her up,” Duncan said, sobbing uncontrollably as he recounted the scene to the detective.
Haley was taken to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead less than an hour later. Child welfare workers and a coroner examined her and noticed some scratches and a faded bruise on her face but no bite marks, according to recent court filings. Sasser said he didn’t see any bite marks either but noted the bruising and “extensive injuries to her anus” in legal filings.
The detective searched the couple’s home for any evidence of sexual assault but didn’t find a trace of blood or semen — not on Duncan, his clothing or any of the items within the house. Later that evening, Sasser arrested Duncan for negligent homicide, which carried a maximum sentence at the time of five years in Louisiana.
That charge would only stick for a few hours.
Shortly after Duncan’s arrest, law enforcement and prosecutors would send the girl’s body to a morgue 120 miles to the east in Jackson, Mississippi, where West and Hayne were awaiting its arrival.
The Pathologist and the Dentist
At the time of Haley’s death, Hayne and West dominated the autopsy business in Mississippi and were making inroads into Louisiana. Hayne could turn autopsies around quickly, and his findings nearly always supported the working theory of law enforcement, implicating their main suspect in whatever crime they were investigating, defense attorneys in multiple cases said.
Hayne had found an ideal collaborator in West, one of the leading experts in forensic bite mark analysis, a relatively new science that claimed to be able to match bite marks on a victim with the teeth of the suspected biter.
On multiple occasions, Hayne claimed to be performing up to 90% of all autopsies in Mississippi and boasted that he completed 1,200 to 1,800 procedures in a single year. If true, that would far exceed the recommended annual maximum of 250 set by the National Association of Medical Examiners. When pathologists surpass that number, they risk engaging in shortcuts and making mistakes, according to the organization.
Hayne, who died in 2020, had a long, documented history of errors, according to news reports, court records and books written about the pair in the years after Duncan’s conviction. In one case, he testified that he removed a victim’s spleen when in fact it had already been removed prior to the man’s death. In another, he said he found in a female child a fully formed prostate gland, an organ that does not exist in girls.
What We’re Watching
During Donald Trump’s second presidency, ProPublica will focus on the areas most in need of scrutiny. Here are some of the issues our reporters will be watching — and how to get in touch with them securely.
Learn more about our reporting team. We will continue to share our areas of interest as the news develops.
If you don’t have a specific tip or story in mind, we could still use your help. Sign up to be a member of our federal worker source network to stay in touch.
We’re trying something new. Was it helpful?
Hayne, however, dismissed questions over his workload, saying he had a superhuman capacity for labor, according to the 2018 book “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist” by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington. “I work at a much more efficient level and much harder than most people,” Hayne said, according to court testimony from a 2003 murder trial outlined in the book. “I was blessed with that and cursed with that, but that’s what I carry with me.”
West held an equally high opinion of his own abilities. When a defense attorney in an unrelated case later asked how often he is wrong, the dentist replied that his error rate is “something less than my savior, Jesus Christ.”
In 1993, after receiving Haley’s body, Hayne performed what Duncan’s defense described in legal filings as a preliminary examination and noted what he believed to be bite marks on the body. He called Sasser that same night to report his findings, saying there was also evidence of sexual assault. Shortly after that call, the detective told the DA to upgrade Duncan’s charge from negligent homicide to first-degree murder, which can be punishable by death.
The next morning, West examined the girl’s body and, according to the video he recorded, appeared to manufacture the bite marks that confirmed Hayne’s findings.
West has 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 because it provides the most accurate results, according to a 2020 interview with Oxygen.com.
At Duncan’s trial in 1998, Hayne took the stand. West didn’t.
By then, West was serving a one-year suspension from the American Board of Forensic Odontology for “overstating his credentials” and misidentifying tooth marks. So prosecutors brought in another bite mark expert, Dr. Neal Riesner, to testify — but they never showed him the West video. Instead, Riesner commented only on photographs taken from West’s examination, a move by prosecutors that Duncan’s current defense team called an “appalling failure.”
The prosecution had pushed for the West video to remain hidden, arguing to Judge Charles Joiner that the only reason the defense wanted to show it was so it could “drag Dr. West into the case” and “create ancillary issues for the jury to consider.”
Joiner agreed that the video was inadmissible after determining there was nothing on it that would point to Duncan’s innocence. Joiner did not explain his reasoning.
West, in the interview with The New Republic, disputed the merits of his suspension, saying his methods are valid because other people have used them. He said he chose not to testify because of Haley’s physical resemblance to his daughter, and it would have been too emotional for him.
When Hayne took the stand, he testified that Haley had suffered a savage attack in which she was bitten, sexually assaulted, then drowned to cover up the crime. It was later revealed that Hayne had misrepresented his forensics pathology credentials during the trial, according to the Innocence Project.
Haley’s mother did not respond to requests for comment. She had testified during the trial that she never saw Duncan physically or sexually abuse the child and said she told him to follow the doctor’s guidance not to leave Haley unattended in the tub.
After about two weeks of testimony and arguments, the jury found Duncan guilty and later sentenced him to death. Rape, the jury determined, was an aggravating factor that prompted them to recommend the death penalty, even though such charges were never brought. He was taken to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola while prosecutors continued to call upon Hayne and West to help them solve some of the worst crimes in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Cracks, however, continued to grow in the forensics team’s facade. And in a few years, it would completely shatter.
A Broader Pattern of Misconduct
A decade into Duncan’s sentence, two men from Noxubee County in Mississippi walked out of prison after problems emerged with Hayne’s and West’s testimonies used to convict them.
Juries had sentenced Levon Brooks to life in prison and Kennedy Brewer to death after the testimonies connected them to the separate rapes and murders of two 3-year-old girls. In each instance, Hayne conducted an autopsy, during which he found what he characterized as human bite marks. He then brought in West, who confirmed the presence of those bite marks and, after pushing dental molds of suspects’ teeth into the victim’s bodies, connected the marks to the prime suspects identified by police.
Throughout their trials, Brooks and Brewer insisted they were innocent and offered alibis to clear their names.
Their exonerations in 2008 marked the first high-profile cases in which the testimonies of Hayne and West were found by the courts to be riddled with errors and, in some instances, completely fabricated.
In Brooks’ and Brewer’s cases, DNA evidence proved that the two girls were murdered by the same man, Justin Albert Johnson, who was later convicted. Forensic experts determined that the marks Hayne and West said were created by human teeth in the Brewer case were actually created by bugs and crawfish eating away at the girl’s corpse while it floated in a pond. In Brooks’ case, West and Hayne misidentified scrapes as bite marks, according to news reports at the time.
West told Oxygen.com that while he accepts that Johnson confessed to the killings, he doesn’t believe Johnson acted alone and still believes Brooks and Brewer were responsible for the bite marks on the two girls. Brooks died in 2018; Brewer declined to comment through his attorney.
A year after Brooks and Brewer were freed, the National Academy of Sciences issued a damning report on bite mark analysis in which it stated there is “no evidence of an existing scientific basis for identifying an individual to the exclusion of all others.” Other reports found that skin cannot accurately hold the form of teeth, that there is no proof teeth provide unique individual markers and that analysts often have trouble determining if a bite mark is in fact a bite mark and if the source is even human.
Since 1982, there have been 32 people in the United States who were convicted largely due to bite mark evidence and later exonerated, according to the Innocence Project.
Following the exonerations of Brooks and Brewer, civil rights attorneys began to dismantle many of Hayne and West’s most high-profile cases.
When I testified in this case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bite marks. I no longer believe that.
West even admitted that he no longer believed in bite mark analysis in a 2011 deposition that was part of the post-conviction appeal for Leigh Stubbs, who had been sentenced to 44 years in prison for assault. West had testified at her 2001 trial that he found bite marks on the victim’s hip, which he matched to a mold of Stubbs’ teeth. As in Duncan’s case, West is seen on a video using that mold to make bite marks on the victim, who was in a coma at the time, according to Stubbs’ attorney who saw the video. West has said pressing the dental mold against the victim’s flesh was part of his verification method.
Stubbs was exonerated in 2013 after more than a decade in prison.
“When I testified in this case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bite marks. I no longer believe that,” West said during a deposition when a defense attorney asked if he was still confident in his analysis of bite marks. “And if I was asked to testify in this case again, I would say I don’t believe it’s a system that’s reliable enough to be used in court.”
When pressed as to whether he made mistakes in previous cases, West said, “I made bite mark analysis that turned out to be wrong, yes.”
In 2021, the courts overturned Eddie Lee Howard’s murder conviction and death sentence after noting the absence of bite marks in the autopsy photos — and the presence of another man’s DNA on the murder weapon — despite West’s 1994 testimony connecting bite marks to Howard. Hayne had had the body of murder victim Georgia Kemp exhumed and unembalmed three days after her burial because he believed he might have missed several bite marks during her autopsy. West then examined the body and claimed to have found those bite marks.
Mississippi Supreme Court Justice James Kitchens said in his opinion about Howard’s case that West and his methodology have faced “overwhelming rejection by the forensics community,” and that the court “should not uphold a conviction and death sentence on the testimony of a proven unreliable witness, Dr. West.”
Hayne’s reputation had also been unraveling over the years. A Louisiana judge on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals described Hayne as the “now discredited Mississippi coroner” who “lied about his qualifications as an expert and thus gave unreliable testimony about the cause of death” in a 2014 opinion about a different murder case.
Prosecutors Suppressed Evidence
All the while, Duncan, now 56, remained locked behind bars.
During that time, his defense team discovered more examples of what they characterized as prosecutorial misconduct.
Aside from the discredited bite mark analysis, the most damning testimony during Duncan’s trial had come from a jailhouse informant, Michael Cruse, who briefly shared a cell in the Ouachita Correctional Center with more than a dozen people, including Duncan, as he awaited trial.
According to Cruse, a distraught Duncan willingly provided graphic details about raping and killing Haley, insisted he blacked out at one point during the attack and claimed “the devil took over.”
What prosecutors did not reveal at the time, though, is that when Cruse initially wrote to them from his jail cell, he offered to share Duncan’s confession for “obvious” reasons. Cruse, who had been arrested for burglary and was facing up to 12 years in prison, then suggested if the DA helps him, he could return the favor. “If I can work this out perhaps I can help in other areas as well.”
After testifying in Duncan’s case, Cruse was given a three-year suspended sentence; prosecutors said in the January brief that his sentence was “not an out of the ordinary plea offer.”
The DA’s office never gave Duncan’s defense team a copy of Cruse’s letter in which he appeared to offer his assistance in exchange for leniency, something that could have been used to undermine his testimony. Duncan’s team, which only learned of the letter years after his conviction, described the transgression as a flagrant violation of a federal law requiring prosecutors to hand over all evidence that could help in their client’s defense.
Prosecutors, in their January filing defending Duncan’s conviction, pointed to a Louisiana Supreme Court rejection of Duncan’s 1999 appeal in which the court stated that even if the letter had been produced, it would not have affected the outcome of the trial.
In November 2022, more than 24 years after Duncan was convicted, his legal team tracked Cruse down and pressed him about the accuracy of his testimony. Cruse admitted to an investigator hired by the defense that Duncan “never said he was guilty” and spent the majority of this time in their jail cell with his “head down … mumbling and crying to himself,” according to Cruse’s statements in the court filings. The defense team also found another cellmate of Duncan’s, Michael Lucas, who said that Cruse was constantly harassing Duncan about the baby’s death, and that Duncan never confessed.
He “just cried over and over again saying he did not do it. He didn’t do it,” Lucas told the investigator, according to court documents filed by the defense.
Ruddick, the lead prosecutor, dismissed the new statements, saying in last year’s appeals hearing that Cruse, who could not be located to testify in 2024, had previously testified twice under oath that Duncan had confessed. Any statement given decades later is worthless hearsay, Ruddick said.
Verite News and ProPublica could not reach Cruse for comment through email or phone calls.
Allegations that Duncan had raped Haley were similarly problematic, according to court filings. Dr. Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist and an expert witness for the defense, said in court last September that Haley’s anal injuries were likely caused by hard stools, constipation or an infection, which can often mimic an assault.
“There’s absolutely no sexual assault,” Melinek said in court after reviewing Haley’s post-mortem exams.
Duncan’s defense team also uncovered evidence, not heard at the first trial, that provided a potential cause of Haley’s death. In the weeks prior to her drowning, Haley had suffered several head injuries, the worst happening when she attempted to climb a chest of drawers and the entire structure fell on her. Haley spent six days in the hospital during which a CT scan showed three skull fractures.
When she was discharged, doctors warned her family to not leave her unattended in a bathtub as she might suffer seizures, according to court filings. Haley spent most of the next two weeks with her maternal grandparents. She returned home to her mother and Duncan the night before she died.
None of that evidence, however, was presented at trial. Louis Scott, who represented Duncan at the time, struck a deal with prosecutors that neither side would raise the issue. Scott’s wife told Verite News and ProPublica that he is experiencing health challenges, including memory loss, but would relay a message to him; Scott has not responded.
In October 2023, Duncan’s current legal team flew to the DA’s office in Monroe to present to prosecutors all the additional evidence it had uncovered. Greene, one of the defense attorneys, said he wanted to give Tew, the DA, a chance to reconsider his position and avoid a miscarriage of justice before the new evidence was laid bare in court. But Tew did not show.
Instead, Ruddick sat patiently through the defense team’s hourlong PowerPoint presentation, asked a question or two and said very little, according to members of the team.
Greene offered to fly back at any time to meet with the DA to further discuss the case. “Ruddick said, ‘I’ll let you know,’” Greene recalled. “And then nothing happened.”
One year later, following the six-day appeals hearing last fall, the state filed its response, making clear what it thought of all the new evidence: “Defendant, Jimmie Duncan, is a murderer.”
Mariam Elba contributed research.
