Before Duncan was exonerated, nine others in Louisiana and Mississippi had been freed after convictions based partly on testimony from the same two forensic experts, Michael West and Steven Hayne — three of them had been on death row. Duncan is the last person waiting execution based on their work, and his case demonstrates that Louisiana's justice system took nearly three decades to discard a form of "science" that the state's supreme court called indefensible from a scientific standpoint. This is not a single mistake, but a repeating pattern of error — and it raises questions for anyone who has faced or is facing the criminal justice system in the American South.
Once a death sentence is carried out, there is no way to correct it as there was for Duncan.
The Mechanism That Prolonged Injustice for a Lifetime
Duncan was arrested on December 18, 1993, while babysitting Haley at a home in West Monroe, and was initially charged with negligent manslaughter before prosecutors upgraded the charge to first-degree murder after Hayne and West became involved. A video recording of the forensic examination from 1993 — never shown to the jury at trial — shows West pressing Duncan's bite impression directly onto the child's body, a technique that Chief Justice Weimer compared to "trial by water" ordeals from 17th-century witch hunts. The delay between the initial misconduct and the correction — 28 years — is crucial: it shows that once a jury has believed in flawed "science," reversing a conviction requires decades of appeals, post-conviction motions, and persistent investigative journalism.
Why This Matters to Vietnamese Americans
Louisiana has a significant Vietnamese community along the Gulf of Mexico, from New Orleans to coastal parishes. With a Vietnamese-origin community already facing language barriers and limited access to private attorneys, the risk of relying on unvetted forensic evidence — or of court-appointed lawyers lacking resources to challenge "experts" like West and Hayne — is far from remote. Governor Jeff Landry's push to accelerate executions after 15 years of moratorium makes the margin for error in this system more dangerous than ever: once a death sentence is carried out, there is no way to correct it as there was for Duncan.
What to Watch
This state supreme court ruling comes as federal courts nationwide have also recently rejected numerous attempts to expand government power, from an appellate court rejecting a proposal to expand mandatory detention by ICE immigration authorities to lawsuits over voter data. This suggests a broader trend: courts are increasingly willing to question executive and prosecutorial agencies when evidence or authority is shaky. For the Vietnamese community in Louisiana and neighboring states, the practical lesson is: when facing a criminal case, families should demand independent review of all forensic evidence the prosecutor relies on, especially methods outside those subjected to rigorous scientific verification like DNA testing. Legal aid nonprofits on the Gulf Coast, along with Vietnamese-speaking attorneys, are resources that many Vietnamese-origin families are unaware of or have never accessed.