NATCHEZ — After more than 13 years on death row, an Adams County man has been granted a 2017 court date to argue that new evidence should warrant a new trial.

Judge Forrest “Al” Johnson, who oversaw Jeffrey Havard’s first trial, issued an order setting an evidentiary hearing for Aug. 14 to Aug. 16, 2017, for Havard, citing the defendant’s call for the hearing “on the issues of newly discovered evidence presented in his application for leave.”

If the evidence is compelling enough, the court could order a new trial for the case.

Havard was sentenced to death in December 2002 for the February death earlier that year of Chloe Britt, the 6-month-old daughter of his then-girlfriend.

Prosecutors said Britt died of shaken baby syndrome after he shook her following the commission of a sexual battery, while Havard maintained that the head trauma she suffered was the result of an accidental drop as he took her out of the bathtub the night she died.

Havard’s mother Cheryl Harrell said his family was “excited, ecstatic” to know the hearing was moving forward.

“We feel like this is going to be the end to a long 14 years of life that was taken from him, and we feel like it is freedom for him,” she said. “I feel like this is the best thing that has happened in the whole 14 years he has spent there (in prison).”

The lead pathologist in the case — Steven Hayne — testified at trial that the injuries Britt received were consistent with shaken baby syndrome, but in 2013 he said in an affidavit that medical advances since then have shown shaking alone could not have caused the injuries and that current state-of-the-art pathology “would classify those injuries as shaken baby syndrome with impact or blunt force trauma.”

A second pathologist, Dr. Michael Baden, likewise concluded after reviewing the case that the death was consistent with “a short accidental fall,” noting that the neck, chest, spine and rib injuries that usually accompany abusive shaking were not present.

Hayne’s 2002 autopsy said that a 1-centimeter contusion on the baby’s body was “consistent” with sexual abuse, but in 2013 he said he “found no definitive evidence of sexual abuse based on my findings.”

At trial he had testified the contusion was 1 inch, but in 2009 Hayne reaffirmed the autopsy’s measurement of 1 centimeter.

A third pathologist, Janice Ophoven, has written in an opinion that the allegations of abuse were because hospital personnel “who did not have experience or expertise in post mortem changes in infants” misinterpreted the contusion.

Havard likewise has noted in previous court filings that the rape kit for the case came back negative.

If the case is given a new trial, the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office will try it. The attorney general’s office is also representing the state in the evidentiary hearing set for August 2017.