Thirty-three Years After His Conviction, Former Death Row Prisoner Asks Supreme Court for Justice

Crosley Green was sentenced to death for murder in Florida in 1990 with an all-white non-unanimous jury. He was removed from death row in 2009 and resentenced to life in prison. He has always maintained his innocence and is now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn his conviction because critical evidence was withheld from his attorneys.

There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime scene, but he was identified as the killer by the sole eyewitness, the victim’s girlfriend. Two detectives investigating the scene informed the prosecutor that they believed the girlfriend was likely the murderer, but the prosecutor did not turn over this important information to the defense team. Finally in 2018, a federal district court overturned Green’s conviction, holding that the evidence should have been given to the defense. However, in 2022 a federal appellate court (11^th Circuit) overturned the lower court’s ruling, in part because it believed the undisclosed evidence was not sufficiently important.

Green is now asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the court of appeals because that court misapplied the law of Brady v. Maryland (1963). Brady requires the state to turn over any relevant evidence to the defense that might change the outcome of the trial. The appellate court held that because the detectives’ statement would have been inadmissible at trial and because it was somewhat repetitive of other evidence the defense had, it would not likely have led to a different outcome. Green argues that the withheld evidence might have helped develop other evidence that would have been admissible and highly relevant.

Green was originally sentenced to death in Florida with an 8–4 jury vote for death. Florida law currently requires unanimous jury votes to sentence a defendant to death, but until 2016 allowed for non-unanimous votes or judicial overrides to impose death sentences. According to DPIC’s research, almost all of the exonerees who were sentenced in that time period similarly had non-unanimous juries. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is urging the state legislature to pass a new law that would only require 8 out of 12 jurors to recommend a sentence of death.