A portrait of Chris as a young man taken soon before he went to jail.Mother Jones; Photo courtesy of family of Chris Duncan

This article was first published by Bolts, as part of a collaboration with Mother Jones.

Jimmie Christian Duncan has spent over 26 years on death row at Louisiana’s Angola prison for the rape and murder of his girlfriend’s toddler daughter—a crime he has always maintained never happened. On Thursday, a Louisiana judge dismissed his conviction, vindicating Duncan’s fierce, decades-long effort to prove his innocence.

Between 1976 and 2015, an astonishing 80 percent of Louisiana’s capital sentences were later reversed.

In his order vacating the conviction, District Court Judge Alvin Sharp wrote that Duncan had successfully demonstrated his claim of “factual innocence” based on new evidence that was not available at the original trial. His conviction relied on a so-called bite mark analysis, a method that’s since been discredited and is widely regarded as ‘junk science’, that was conducted by a now-infamous duo, doctor Steven Hayne and dentist Michael West. As I reported in Bolts and Mother Jones last month, Hayne and West have since been found responsible for a host of other wrongful convictions; Duncan is the last man left on death row who had been convicted on the basis of their work.

Duncan’s case fits with a long tradition of wrongful convictions in Louisiana. Between 1976 and 2015, an astonishing 80 percent of the state’s capital sentences were later reversed—nine people have been exonerated off death row in the time that Duncan has been there.

But he is also the first person to receive relief under Louisiana’s factual innocence statute, a reform that........

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