He Spent 27 Years on Death Row as a Wrongfully Convicted Man. What Comes Next?

Jimmie "Chris" Duncan spent twenty-seven years on Louisiana's death row after being convicted in the 1993 death of his girlfriend's twenty-three-month-old daughter, a case built largely on bite-mark evidence from two forensic experts whose methods have since been widely discredited as junk science. ProPublica reports that in June, the Louisiana Supreme Court threw out Duncan's conviction, ruling that the marks found on the child's body could not have been made by a human being — the state's chief justice went so far as to compare the prosecution to seventeenth-century witch trials. But Duncan still isn't fully free: the local district attorney has said he may retry him and has until next June to decide, leaving Duncan in legal and financial limbo. He's now working the night shift at a Walmart for seventeen dollars an hour, shut out of Louisiana's wrongful-conviction compensation fund unless and until the case against him is finally closed for good.

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