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.