by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

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.

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........

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