The North Carolina judge who presided over the 1996 murder trial of James Jordan, the father to NBA great Michael Jordan, petitioned the state’s parole commission on Tuesday to release the man he sentenced to life in prison.
The judge, Gregory Weeks, said a forensic blood analyst investigating the case against Daniel Green did not disclose a key finding: The fact that a blood-like substance found inside the car where Jordan was killed might not have been his blood at all.
During the trial, prosecutors argued that Jordan was sleeping in the passenger seat of his Lexus parked along Highway 74 when Green walked up to the vehicle and shot him, Weeks wrote in an affidavit submitted to the commission. The argument supported the testimony of their main witness, Larry Demery, Green’s co-defendant, who accused Green of pulling the trigger.
But the analyst never disclosed that other forensic tests she ran from inside the vehicle came back negative or inconclusive for blood.
On Tuesday, Weeks told the commission that the omission of these test results — evidence that could have changed the outcome of the trial — has haunted him for nearly three decades, according to several criminal justice advocates who were at the proceeding.
After the hearing, the advocates contacted Green, 49, who is serving a life sentence at Southern Correctional Institution in North Carolina. They told him about what Weeks had said.
The fact that the judge who “presided over my trial asked that I be paroled is significant,” Green told ABC News in a phone interview from the prison. “It speaks volumes about this case, and I’m overwhelmingly grateful.”
The commission is expected to deliberate for at least one month on whether to grant Green parole, according to a spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction.
Weeks declined to comment, saying that he will wait for the commission to make its decision.
During the murder trial, prosecutors said Green, then 18, and Demery, his childhood friend, killed Jordan on July 23, 1993, during a robbery gone wrong.
Green told ABC News he was at a cookout with Demery. Demery told him that he was leaving to make a drug deal. Many hours later, Demery returned to the cookout, visibly shaken. According to Green, Demery asked him for help disposing of a body. Green said that he agreed to help Demery, but has maintained he never killed Jordan.
Authorities located Jordan’s body less than two weeks later in a swamp in South Carolina, 60 miles away from his abandoned Lexus, in Robeson County, North Carolina.
In a letter to the commission, Green said, “Every day I live with the remorse and the pain and the suffering caused by my youthful decisions. I regret the harm my actions inflicted on the Jordan family.”
On Tuesday, Weeks and criminal justice advocates, including Rev. Thomas Jones, pushed for Green’s release.
“When I heard the judge speak on his behalf, I was weeping,” Jones said. “I was flabbergasted.”
The judge told the commission he had presided over many trials, Jones said, but “had never been haunted in such a manner as he was haunted by this case.”
