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Man convicted with murder of Michael Jordan’s father in 1993 wants new trial

By Alan Condon

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Daniel Green, the man sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of murdering Michael Jordan’s father over 20 years ago, could be given a second chance to prove his innocence.

For 20 years Daniel Green has always maintained his innocence, and an investigation into the lab which processed the blood evidence for the case has found that it may not have been telling the truth about the results in court.

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For two decades the story behind Michael Jackson’s father’s murder, James Jordan, went like this: James Jordan was shot and killed inside his Lexus in North Carolina on July 23, 1993, and his body was later dumped in a swamp.

The murder occurred after Jordan pulled over on a highway on the way home from a wedding to take a nap. During the nap, his car was run up on by two men, Daniel Green and Larry Demery.

According to Larry Demery’s testimony, the plan was to steal the Lexus and tie up Jordan, but Green decided to pull the trigger and shoot Jordan. Demery was handed a lesser sentence in a plea deal to testify against Green, and is eligible for parole in 2016.

The testimony from Demery, in addition to blood evidence in the car which supposedly supported Demery’s version of events, was key in convicting Green.

However a 2010 report released by a former FBI agent has found that the lab which processed the blood evidence for the case may not have been telling the truth about the results under oath.

The lab in question, was found to have mishandled 200 cases over a 16-year period – Jordan’s being one of them – and Jennifer Elwell, the lab analyst who worked on the case, allegedly gave false testimony during Green’s trial.

Elwell had stated that the results were “inconclusive”, when in fact, other labs testing the same bloodwork returned a “negative” result. Rather suspiciously, the negative lab results never made it to the trial, and the “inconclusive” bloodwork was mysteriously destroyed when Green appealed his verdict.

The new trial request from Green’s lawyers also criticizes investigators for never questioning the man who was called from Jordan’s phone after his death. The request says that the call went to the son of the then-Sheriff Hubert Stone, a friend of the lead investigator and a co-worker of Green’s at the time.

“The discovery of the call from Jordan’s car phone to a convicted drug trafficker with close ties to the sheriff’s department casts a whole new light on this case and undermines confidence in the verdict,” said Green’s defense attorney.

There is overtly a seismic antithesis between stealing a car and committing a murder, and that contrast is vastly magnified by the difference in sentencing. With Demery due to be out on parole next year, and Green to continue his life imprisonment, the prosecutors better be sure that they have got their man.

20 years later with destroyed blood evidence, an allegedly corrupt lab and a false testimony, the case may be reopened with Daniel Green given another chance to prove his innocence.

[H/T Complex.com]

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