The judge who presided over the murder trial of Michael Jordan’s father, James Jordan, has called for one of the convicted killers to be released.
Daniel Green, who was 18 at the time, was convicted of first-degree murder alongside Larry Demery and sentenced to life in prison in 1996.
James Jordan was shot while sleeping in the passenger seat of his Lexus along the side of Highway 74 in North Carolina on July 23, 1993.
Green has admitted to helping his childhood friend Demery dispose of the body in a swamp in South Carolina, 60 miles away from where the shooting took place, but denies killing James Jordan and claims he was at a party when the murder occurred.
Retired judge Gregory Weeks has now petitioned North Carolina’s parole commission for the release of Green, claiming that a forensic blood analyst did not disclose a key finding during the trial which could have changed the verdict.
‘The fact that the judge who presided over my trial asked that I be paroled is significant,’ Green told ABC News.
‘It speaks volumes about this case, and I’m overwhelmingly grateful.’
North Carolina’s parole commission will now deliberate for at least a month over whether to release Green, who was denied a new trial in 2019.
In an interview with NBC 5 in 2018, Green said: ‘I think they should look at the evidence. If you look at the evidence, the evidence is going to speak for itself – that there is no evidence that I killed James Jordan, because I didn’t.’
Green claimed that Demery had told him after the murder: ‘He said ‘Listen, I went out there and we had an altercation. This guy tried me and I shot him’.’
Speaking on The Last Dance documentary on Netflix, Michael Jordan opened up on the key influence his father had on his childhood and his career.
‘He was my rock. You know, we were very close. He constantly gave me advice,’ Jordan said.
‘I remember, in ninth grade, I got suspended three times in one year.
‘My father pulled me aside that summer and said: ‘Look, you don’t look like you’re heading in the right direction. You know, if you want to go about doing all this mischievous stuff, you can forget sports.’ And that’s all I needed to hear.
‘From that point on, it was like tunnel vision. I never got in trouble from that point on.
‘You know, my mother was so strong. The first thing she says: ‘You know, you got to be thankful.’ You know, and I started looking at the positive.
‘One of the things that he always taught me is that you have to take a negative and turn it into a positive. So I started looking to the other side of it, and that helped me get through it.’
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