The North Carolina judge who presided over the 1996 murder trial of NBA great Michael Jordan’s father, James Jordan, asked the state’s parole board Tuesday to release him from life in prison.
Judge Gregory Weeks said a forensic blood analyst investigating the case against Daniel Green failed to disclose a key finding: that a blood-like substance found inside the car where Jordan was killed may not have been his blood at all.
At trial, prosecutors argued that Jordan was asleep in the passenger seat of his Lexus parked on Highway 74 when Green approached the vehicle and shot him, Weeks wrote in an affidavit submitted to the commission. The argument relied on the testimony of Green’s co-defendant, Larry Demery, who Green accused of stalking.
But the analyst never disclosed that other forensic tests he conducted from inside the vehicle came back negative or inconclusive for blood.
On Tuesday, Weeks told the committee that the withholding of those test results — evidence that could have changed the outcome of the trial — has haunted him for nearly three decades, according to criminal justice advocates who were present at the proceedings.
After the hearing, defense attorneys contacted Green, 49, who is serving a life sentence at the Southern Correctional Institution in North Carolina. They told him what the week had said.
“The judge presiding over my trial has asked for parole,” Green told ABC News in a phone interview from jail. “He speaks volumes about this case, and I’m incredibly grateful.”
The board will deliberate for at least a month whether to grant Green parole, according to a spokeswoman for the North Carolina Department of Adult Corrections.
Weeks has not commented, saying he will wait until the board makes a decision.
During the murder trial, prosecutors said Green, then 18, and Demery, his childhood friend, killed Jordan on July 23, 1993, during a botched robbery.
Green told ABC News he was at a cookout with Demery. Demery told him he was going to do a drug deal. Many hours later, Demery returned to the kitchen, visibly shaken. According to Green, Demery asked him for help in removing a body. Green said he agreed to help Demery, but said he never killed Jordan.
Authorities found Jordan’s body two weeks later in a South Carolina swamp about 60 miles from the abandoned Lexus in Robeson County, North Carolina.
In a letter to the commission, Green said: “I live every day with regret and pain and suffering caused by the decisions of my youth. I regret the harm my actions have caused to the Jordan family.’
On Tuesday, Weeks and criminal justice advocates, the Rev. Thomas Jones. included, they pushed for Green’s release.
“When I heard the judge speak on his behalf, I was in tears,” Jones said. “I was shocked.”
The judge told the board that he had presided over many trials, Jones said, but had “never been harassed the way this case was.”
