Death Penalty

Will This Mississippi Man on Death Row Get a Chance To Prove His Innocence?

Recent court rulings in Louisiana and Texas give hope to Devin Bennett.

James McWilliams | 7.24.2026 10:00 AM

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(Illustration: Mississippi Department of Corrections/Webdata/Dreamstime)

It was early in the morning on August 25, 2000. As Devin Bennett tells it, he put his 10-week-old son Brandon in a car seat and put the car seat on his bed—and then, as the father dozed in and out of sleep, Brandon fell.

The baby didn't appear to be hurt in the immediate aftermath of the fall, Bennett says, but hours later he noticed the boy was having trouble breathing. He rushed him to a hospital in Rankin County, Mississippi, where Brandon's heart stopped beating and he stopped breathing. After being transferred to another hospital, Brandon died.

Two and a half years later, a jury found Bennett guilty of capital murder and felonious child abuse and sentenced him to death. The medical examiners responsible for Brandon's autopsy—doctors Steven Hayne and Michael West, a pathologist and an odontologist who often worked together—presented evidence that the fatal injuries resulted from a kind of nonaccidental trauma that, at the time, was considered a sound medical diagnosis.

Their autopsy report, written by Hayne, cited "changes consistent with concurrent shaken baby syndrome."

Hayne and West reached this conclusion because the classic "shaken baby syndrome triad"—bleeding around the brain, bleeding behind the eyes, and brain swelling—were evident in Brandon. At the time, the triad was considered solid evidence of shaken baby syndrome. 

Bennett has been fighting to prove his innocence since 2002. He and I speak frequently and frankly about his case, noting how it hinges on a flawed autopsy and the changing science around shaken baby syndrome. Fighting the state of Mississippi for decades to get an evidentiary hearing has generally left Bennett exhausted and frustrated.

But on June 30, he felt some hope.

The Case of Jimmie Duncan

On June 29, the Louisiana Supreme Court declared an inmate named Jimmie Duncan to be "factually innocent" after he spent 27 years on death row.

Duncan was convicted in 1998 of first-degree capital murder for sexually assaulting and drowning his girlfriend's 23-month-old toddler, Haley Oliveaux. Today he is free on bail—in part because, according to the Louisiana Supreme Court, "Duncan's conviction turned substantially on forensic evidence offered by experts whose reliability 'appears questionable at best.'"

When he read this decision, Devin Bennett took note. Those questionable experts were the same pathologist and odontologist who performed his son's autopsy: Hayne and West.

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