*The wrong man may have been convicted for the July 1993 murder of Michael Jordan’s father. The Daily Mail is reporting that Daniel Green, one of the men convicted of killing James Jordan, claims that he was the victim of a police cover up.
Green was jailed for life for the murder of James Jordan, who was shot dead in his Lexus as he took a nap by the side of the road on his way home from a funeral near Lumberton, North Carolina, in 1993. According to reports, Green and his friend Larry Demery stole Jordan’s car, phone and jewelry after shooting him and dumped his body in a swamp in South Carolina. His corpse was found several weeks later, and could only be identified through dental records.
Green’s lawyers filed a motion, claiming that Jordan’s murder wasn’t a botched carjacking — as widely reported — but instead a drug deal gone wrong. They also claim the drug transaction has ties to the Robeson County Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina. Demery was allegedly ordered to carry out a drug deal by Hubert Larry Deese — a cocaine trafficker who happens to be the illegitimate son of ex-sheriff Hubert Stone.
During the alleged transaction, Demery may have mistaken Jordan’s dad for a participant in the drug deal, subsequently shooting and killing the wrong man. Green’s lawyers say that when Demery learned the identity of the man he killed, he called Deese on James Jordan’s phone.
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Green’s lawyer alleges that Deese advised Demery to get Green to help dispose of the body, and defense attorneys believe a jury needs to hear the details of their phone call so that they can reject prosecutors’ case of a carjacking.
“If the jury had been made aware of evidence that the Sheriff and those under his command had been actively conspiring with a drug trafficker who had connections to Larry Demery, they would have had ample reason to question the integrity of the entire investigation that identified Daniel Green as the killer,” Green’s lawyer, Ian Mance, wrote in the motion, as obtained by the Daily Mail. “If the jury had known the Sheriff’s Office had a strong motive to conceal evidence of a drug motive, for which there was already some evidence in the record, they would have been less likely to conclude that the murder transpired in the course of a car jacking.”
Demery accepted a plea deal from prosecutors and claimed it was Green who fired the fatal shot. Green never pleaded guilty to the crime, admitting only to being an Demery’s accomplice but not to murder.
Now, 23 years after their conviction and in his latest bid for freedom, Green’s lawyers have filed a motion claiming the murder was a drug deal gone wrong, and the dealers have ties to the Robeson County Sheriff’s Office.
According to the motion, Deese received heavy protection from detectives within his father’s department. The same year in which Jordan was murdered, Sheriff Stone even warned his son ‘the Feds were on to him’, the motion alleges.
Many of the officers who served beneath Stone were later thrown in jail after being found to have committed gross misconduct. Twenty-two officers were charged as a result of the investigation which was labeled Operation Tarnished Brush, per Daily Mail.
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