(July 17)
It is almost impossible to think of a punishment too severe for someone who — I hate to even write these words — raped and murdered a two-year-old.
On the other hand, unless you are the two-year-old or her loved ones, it is hard to imagine many fates worse than spending 32 years in prison, and at least nominally on death row, for a mistaken conviction for supposedly having committed such a godawful crime.
And if a district judge, upon seeing new science, rules that you are “factual[ly] innocen[t]” of the crime — indeed, that the evidence suggests no rape or murder even happened — then the apparently innocent man surely deserves bail and release, with appropriate safeguards, while the state appeals the judge’s ruling.
That issue — release on bail, or not — is the focus of a hearing scheduled July 22 in Monroe for longtime death-row inmate Jimmie “Chris” Duncan, who was arrested in 1993 for causing the death of the 23-month-old daughter of his live-in girlfriend. He was convicted of rape and murder but, if Judge Alvin Sharp is reading the new evidence correctly, he was responsible instead only for extremely stupid negligence.
This column can’t pretend to declare Duncan innocent. That would require sitting through days and days of open-court testimony. It is, however, worth understanding that, all along, there have been two wildly divergent stories of what happened to young Haley Oliveaux — and that a judge, hearing copious evidence relying on new scientific understandings, has now found Duncan innocent.
The prosecution’s story is that Duncan, while babysitting Haley and giving her a bath, suddenly lost his mind and abused and then killed her by drowning her in a bathtub. Duncan’s story is that he left her, seemingly healthy, taking a bath while he went into the kitchen to wash dishes, and that he returned to find her face down, accidentally drowned.
It is certainly arguable that leaving a two-year-old alone in a bathtub amounts to criminal negligence. Still, that is a far cry from the sickeningly heinous act for which prosecutors convicted him and put him on death row…. [The full column is at this link.]
