Murder in the Orange Grove: The Troubled Case Against Crosley Green - Life or Death Row: 5

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

After four witnesses said they lied at Crosley Green's murder trial, their recantations drew the attention of the county's State's Attorney, who requested an investigation into Crosley's case. Eventually, key evidence would emerge that would change the course of Crosley’s life.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Did it ever occur to you or anyone else that maybe Kim Halleck wasn't telling the truth? Well, of course it did. I mean, it always does. I don't accept what everyone tells me at face value. That's former assistant state attorney Chris White. He was one of two prosecutors who tried Crossley Green for the murder of Chip Flynn back in 1990. Back in 2015, I asked him why Kim Halleck was never investigated as a possible suspect.

What do you mean? No GSR taken of her hands? Why not? I don't know if there was or wasn't at this point. There wasn't? Why weren't her clothes collected? Um, again. clothes collected? Again. Why weren't pictures taken of her hands or arms to see if she had any injuries? Well, those are all interesting questions, but I'm not really quite sure that you ought to ignore all the things that were done and do exist. But what I've been told is that it's just standard practice that you investigate the person who's calling 911,

one of the last people to see Chip Flynn alive, that you would investigate her. But your own investigator said she was never, ever investigated as a suspect. And I wasn't the only one who wondered why. Beginning in 1999, the private investigators, forensic experts, the media, and the state reexamined and questioned the validity of Crosley's conviction after four state witnesses recanted and said they lied at trial.

I'm 48Hours correspondent Erin Moriarty. This is Murder in the Orange Grove, the troubled case against Crosley Green, Episode 5, Life or Death Row. 48 Hours, we take you there. On September 5th, 1990, an all-white jury, eight women and four men, convicted Crosley Green of kidnapping, robbery, and first-degree murder. The judge then sentenced him to death. Since then, Crosley Green has been on death row, nine years, waiting to die. After 48 Hours aired Impossible Mission on November 1, 1999, other news outlets picked up the story about the four witnesses who had recanted their testimonies.

We got letters from viewers who were outraged and wanted to know more. Several different attorneys stepped up and offered to represent Crosley. And even before our report aired, Crosley's case had already grabbed so much attention that Florida State Attorney Norm Wolfinger requested the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, also known as the FDLE, to review the case. You must have been concerned about some of these questions that the detectives have raised for you to call in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. This is an investigation.

We have somebody on death row, so we want to do a fair, independent review. And that's what we're going to do. In 1999, I met with Wolfinger to discuss Carlsly Green's case. And I asked him if he's ever had four witnesses in one trial recant a decade later. Have you ever had that? I don't know that we've ever had that accusation made of four persons recanting. I asked the same question of prosecutor Chris White. You know, I never have. I never have.

That doesn't trouble you? Not coming from those people with those ties to the Green family and the Green family being what it is. No, it doesn't trouble me a great deal. I think virtually every one of those folks had prior criminal history. Those people are not law-abiding, honest people that you can trust to tell the truth

about something like that. And that's the way I took it. I'm sorry, but that's the way I took it. Those people that White now called unreliable and dishonest were the same ones that he used to build his case at trial and told the jury to trust. Why did you use people that you say have no credibility and you offered them deals, helped them out if they would say that Crossley Green confessed?

You say you used people that had no credibility. I was pretty much convinced that if they had watched this happen, they would have never told us about it unless they found themselves in a situation where it was of benefit to them to actually tell us what I consider would be the truth. And State Attorney Wolfinger's response to the recantations? Is that a concern? That's why FTLE is looking at it. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement, or the FTLE,

was set up to support state agencies in preventing, investigating, and solving crimes in the state of Florida. For Crosley's case, inspectors were asked to review the crime scene details again, re-interview witnesses, collect all available forensic evidence and then break down point by point their investigation. I have all the confidence in the world they're going to do a good job and we'll go from there. If they find these things in fact happen,

that's going to be embarrassing for this office, isn't it? It's not embarrassing if somebody lies on the stand. You can't control people lying on the stand. But if it involved some questionable tactics by the prosecution's office. Well those are matters that obviously FDLE will look at, you know, and we'll have them resolved. Crosley and his team of private investigators knew that this could be a turning point in his case. So Crosley was not concerned when the FDLE indicated, as part of the investigation, that two human hairs would

be submitted for DNA testing. That evidence, never used at trial, came from a vacuum collection of Chip Flynn's truck. Crosley was willing to submit a blood sample. Why weren't those tests done earlier? Well, at the time of the murder, the use of forensic DNA technology to test evidence like human hairs was still very new. But by 1999, in the 10 years since Chippsland's murder, the forensic technology had advanced. It would take over 11 months for the FDLE investigators to compile their findings, and on July 25, 2000, they released their report.

In the more than 80-page report, investigators admitted that no evidence was found in either Holder Park or the Orange Grove to implicate Crosley Green. But they also concluded that the prosecution did not pressure Sheila Green, Lonnie Hillary, or Alan Jerome Murray to testify against Crosley. Although all three witnesses recanted their testimonies, investigators said their credibility

was questionable. But the most significant finding of the report came at the end. Investigators determined that the testing of the two human hairs that they identified as quote, negroid body hairs found in the vacuum collection at Chip's truck, connected Crosley Green to the victim's vehicle. And that meant, according to the report, that the DNA results corroborated Kim's identification of Crosley.

The report was devastating. Newspaper headlines read, Drive to Free Death Row Inmate Backfires, and DNA Test Puts Convict at Murder Scene. Norm Wolfinger told the press, and I quote, The DNA match puts Crosley Green in that truck. Obviously we don't have an innocent man on death row. We have the right man. But Crosley's investigators called the state's DNA

testing bad science and the media's coverage shameful for acting on a press release that was, quote, untruthful and misleading. I know I haven't been in that truck. It's not mine. That's not my house. I can't explain it to you other than tell you that I was nowhere around at the time that crime was committed, and I had never been in that truck.

I myself, proud to agree, never been in that truck. I still remember reading the FDLE report for the first time, and that sinking feeling I had. And yet I knew enough about DNA testing to realize that there was something wrong with the report's conclusion. It said, quote, lab-core tests found that the negroid hairs were consistent with the hair samples as originating from Crosley Alexander Green or a maternally related individual.

No other maternal relation of Green's has been identified as a suspect in this case. In the early days of DNA analysis, when juries were presented with this evidence, I think they were given the impression that it was a lot more definitive than it really was. This is Nathan Lentz, a biology professor and a forensic scientist at John Jay College in New York City.

We spoke earlier this year, and he agreed to help me understand how DNA testing has evolved since the time of the FDLE report. Mitochondrial DNA can eliminate someone, but it can't confirm identity. It doesn't really implicate someone. Mitochondrial DNA, unlike nuclear DNA, only contains genes from your mother's side, which means it's not as precise. And that can complicate identifying someone because... Anyone who has the same mother, any two individuals with the same mother, will also have the same mitochondrial DNA.

And then of course, their mother as well, so you can extend that out to first cousins, second cousins, third cousins. If you can imagine a family tree going back looking only at mothers, and you will find that the number of relatives you have, you know, expands exponentially every generation. Are you saying then, just so I understand, millions of people could share the exact same mitochondrial DNA? Exact same, yes. You could go back to the Middle Ages. Nuclear DNA is better at identifying specific individuals

because it's a mixture of genes from both parents. But in this case, the FDLE commissioner said that the two hairs from the truck were just so small that they wouldn't contain enough nuclear DNA for forensic testing. Mitochondrial DNA was their only option. And it's worth restating here what Professor Lentz pointed out as the weakness of mitochondrial DNA testing. Mitochondrial DNA can eliminate someone, but it can't confirm identity. It doesn't really implicate someone. So the Two-Hairs don't definitively place Crosley in the truck.

Could they belong to someone else, like his brother? Well, it turns out... And O'Connor had been in that truck probably maybe a half a dozen times prior to me ever selling the chip. Remember Tim Curtis? He's the guy who owned a local body shop, and he sold Chip Flynn his pickup truck. He was also one of the four witnesses at trial

who recanted. Tim had been friends with Crosley's little brother O'Connor growing up. Here's what O'Connor Green had to say. I know the truck well because I used to drive the truck. I used to take the truck to lunch to lunch sometime and come back. And sometime I used to ride with Tim Curtis in the truck and come back to the shop because I used to be up to a dead body shop all the time. If Crosley Green cannot be excluded and his brother can't be excluded,

how many more people can't be excluded? If you're talking about the area of that region in Florida, I would bet dollars to donuts, you're talking about dozens of people in his, you know, within 100 miles, we'll say. And here's something else to consider. In the vacuum collection, investigators found several other types of hair

along with what they called, quote, negroid body hairs that they linked to Crosley. But the forensic lab was only asked to check for the presence of negroid hairs. I asked Lentz why they didn't test all the hairs and whether he thought that implicit bias might have played a part in this investigation. You can't tell the the racial or ethnic background by looking at a hair either. Of course there are textures and colors that

are more common in some groups than others. Calling it a negroid hair we just don't do that anymore. I mean that was also the language that was used at that time but we don't use we don't say that anymore because it's suggestive. And that's why subjective determinations, you know, really aren't allowed in court or shouldn't be allowed in court. And frankly, it seemed pretty clear that they were on the lookout for a negroid hair. What tells you that? I mean, that's called bias.

Right? And there's an expression, you only find what you look for. And so if you're not, if you're looking for a particular kind of hair to implicate a particular type of person, and you're vacuuming a truck, you're going to find that potentially. And how many other hairs did they just sift through because they weren't looking for that kind of hair? So when the Florida Department of Law Enforcement says, this testing has placed Crosley Alexander Green inside the victim's vehicle.

I don't think that that's a defensible statement. I really don't. I think that Crosley deserves a new trial at the least. This case to me looks like they were trying to find evidence that aligned with what they thought happened. And pointing at Crosley-Green. The mitochondrial DNA test result was a major setback for Crosley. And what's worse, the hairs were destroyed during the test because

forensics use 100% of the hair evidence collected for the investigation. So even if Crosley had dreamed of doing another DNA test another time when DNA technology evolved to give a more definitive answer, he couldn't. [♪ archives, but that's all about to change. Will you tell me something, if you can? We'll name no names. I'm Seth Doan of CBS News, and I'm excited to introduce a new podcast from 60 Minutes called A Second Look. The team at 60 Minutes has spent the last year digging through thousands of tapes and

reels of film, and you're about to hear some of the sound that was never broadcast. Like 21-year-old Taylor Swift. Ten years from now I'll be 30. What's the sound then? We'll hear how much our world has changed and how it hasn't. You were either for the books or against the books. It was almost like a civil war. It's time for A Second Look. Listen to 60 Minutes, A Second Look, wherever you get your podcasts. free on Wondry Plus and the Wondry app. The FDLE's findings may not have exonerated Crosley Green,

but they did confirm the inconsistencies in Kim Halleck's story about the night that Chip Flynn was murdered, like how the bullet recovered from Chip's body may have been fired from his own.22 caliber revolver, not a semi-automatic weapon like Kim described. Or how, although Kim said the suspect's gun accidentally went off at Holder Park, there were no shell casings found there. And casings that were found at the Orange Grove were old and had been there long before

the murder. And there was this, that the main shoe prints in the park, which the prosecution said belonged to the suspect, actually showed someone coming in and out of the area, not disappearing where the truck had been parked, which contradicts the prosecution's diagram that was shown at trial to bolster Kim's story that the suspect drove off with her and Chip. These were serious inconsistencies that I never saw mentioned in the press coverage about the FDLE report. The series of events, as she described them,

do not align with the evidence that's on the scene. Mark Rixie is now retired from the Brevard County Sheriff's Office. It wasn't easy to get him to talk initially, but I've interviewed him since many times over the years covering this case. He was one of the first two responders on the scene of Chip's murder.

I asked him what he thought when he heard Kim's account of the events the night of the murder. I thought it was totally preposterous. Totally. This truck is high off the ground. For someone whose hands are tied behind his back, to get ahold of a gun, jump out of this jacked up truck, and start shooting from behind his back

does not seem credible to me. Whatsoever. You have tons of circumstantial evidence against Kim. One thing against Crosley, 20 things against Kim. You know, I don't see how it could have gone the way it did. There's a lot, Rixie says, he still doesn't understand about that night. Like why it took Kim so long to call 911, why she gave the police the wrong directions multiple times, and why the tire tracks from the truck showed no signs

of hurry. On the way out of the Orange Grove, I followed the same path that the truck left the orchard in. And I noticed that the tire prints were perfectly detailed. If you leave a sandy area or a dirt area in a hurry, you're gonna have some tire spin. There's not gonna be perfectly detailed tire tracks. And these were perfectly detailed.

And what did that say to you? At that moment, nothing, because I didn't know the story of what supposedly happened there. But later on that morning, after we were released from the crime scene, it seemed extremely unusual because she was supposedly leaving that area in a big hurry, you know. And the evidence didn't support that. Former Brevard County Patrol Sergeant Diane Clark was also on the midnight patrol shift the night of the murder.

She was working with Rixie to locate Chip and secure the crime scene. Clark had her own suspicions. If the shooter had what she said was a small, flat weapon, The shooter had what she said was a small flat weapon, flat black, would have been most likely a pistol versus a revolver. They would have had shell casings because a revolver, the casings stay in the weapon with a semi-automatic, they discharge. When the side comes back, the casing pops out the side.

And they never found any casings out there. What does that say to you? Tells me that there wasn't a semi-automatic, and as dark as it was, unless he took the time to scour the area and pick up the casings, or casing or whatever, and I highly doubt that happened, then where were they? Was there ever a semi-automatic out there? I don't see that that makes a case that Kim committed this murder. I brought up Clark's and Rixie's theory about Kim's story to prosecutor Chris White.

I'm not saying that. Well, yes, you are. And you know, that's the only reason I'm here, because I think it's an atrocity that this woman was put through being accused of this at trial, and it was tried. Let me tell you, I was there. And the only thing that happened in the course of all of that was that a jury got to listen to all of the evidence, live from the mouths of the witnesses, and they got to see all of the exhibits.

And they made a determination as to what they believed happened. And I trusted them. Let's talk a little bit about it. Okay, I know you're offended that anyone raised the possibility that Kim Halleck might have had something to do with it, so let's talk about this.

Based on evidence, I'm offended. Now, Rixie told me something else. I believe that she accidentally shot him. Actually, I believe they were sitting at Holder Park, got into an argument. She pulled the gun out of the glove box and shot him accidentally. I don't believe she intentionally wanted

to kill him or shoot him. Panicked, they both panicked, concocted this story, and drove him out there and dropped him off, and said, you know, we'll come back to protect her so she wouldn't go to jail. Once he died, then the stakes were raised tremendously and she could never go back on her story because then she'd be even in more trouble, so.

You actually believe Chip came up with this story along with her. Absolutely. To protect her? He'd have to, he'd have to because it was apparent when I got there that he did not want to tell us who did it. There's no way. And if it was some stranger who abducted him and shot him,

I think the first words out of his mouth would be, he went that way. It was a black man. He went that way. But he would never say. It's always just get me out of here, get me out of here, get me out of here. That's all he would ever say. Did you tell anyone your suspicions?

Oh, absolutely. That morning I told everybody I talked to, you know, all of them. I said, I said, she did it. Mark believes that he knows what Chip told her out there when he wasn't there, huh? But I think we ought to stick with the facts. All right. This was not the first time White had heard about Rixie and Clark's doubts about what happened that night.

He knew about it long before Crosley Green ever went on trial. It turns out the White never disclosed to the defense a critical piece of evidence he had. Notes that he had taken at a meeting with Rixie and Clark who went to his office in August of 1989 over four months after the murder but a year before the trial. This is what your own, you know what this is, this is. Yeah, those are the notes that I took when I was speaking to them. In the notes that White took during that meeting,

he wrote that Rixie and Clark suspected the girl did it and that she changed her story a couple of times. And he also wrote, quote, "'Didn't see any footprint, didn't see any casings. She wouldn't go down there to the scene. Why wouldn't the guy say, who shot him? Just said, I want to go home. I asked Chris White if Clark and Rixie disclosed then

that they believe that Kim Halleck was involved in the shooting. They did. And why didn't you then take their word seriously and investigate to see if in fact they were correct? I reviewed all the evidence that we had with that hypothesis in mind, okay? I'm not sure what investigation you think

could have been accomplished at that point in time when they told me that. By the early 2000s, Crosley was being represented by attorneys from a Florida state agency that represents people on death row. After getting wind of the withheld evidence, his new attorneys filed a motion and fought to get Chris White's file, but the prosecution pushed back, refusing to hand it over, claiming attorney-client privilege. Why weren't these notes handed over to the defense? Your notes?

They're my personal work notes. There's a reason why Crosley's lawyers wanted those notes so badly. And that reason goes back to a decades-old U.S. Supreme Court case known as Brady v. Maryland. That case requires prosecutors to disclose to the defense all material evidence, all of it, regardless of whether that evidence supports the defendant's guilt or innocence. Withholding that evidence is now known as a Brady violation and can lead to a conviction being thrown out. And that's when Crosley began his years-long battle

to prove that withholding those notes denied him a fair trial. The problem, he had to convince the court that those notes were in fact material or crucial to the defense. Wouldn't this have been helpful for the defense to be able to ask more questions about what they saw and heard at the scene? Well, my recollection is that they have presented this argument that this is exculpatory evidence that the defense was denied and that it would have made a difference.

The judge found no, it wouldn't. And that's exactly what happened. Crosley's appeal was denied by a judge who ruled, quote, The purported opinion of deputies Rixie and Clark would not have been admissible at trial. Rixie and Clark's opinion were not considered material under Brady. And now an answer to something that might be troubling you. It certainly bothered me. Why didn't Mark Rixie or Diane Clark on their own

go to the original defense lawyers and share their thoughts? Well, unless you're involved in a complete investigation, you really have to kind of stay out of it. And once we did our job and turned it over to the investigators, we were kind of pushed aside. Once we talked to him and gave him everything we could give him, you know, it was kind of like, okay, you can go now kind of thing. And you know, unless they call you and ask you to come in, you

really kind of keep your nose out of it because they don't bother. Prosecutors didn't just withhold information from Crosley's defense. I asked prosecutor White about misstated evidence in the trial, like the dog tracking evidence. You have been to the scene where the crime started, and you have seen the shoe impressions of that person who came to the truck, who robbed them, who abducted them, who took them to that grove, and who shot Chip. You've seen those shoe impressions. It wasn't just her and Chip out there.

Mr. White, those shoe impressions have never been connected to Crosley Green, the defendant in this case, ever. Remember, Crosley admitted that he walked through the Orange Grove and Holder Park the night of the murder, but Holder Park was a well-traveled area, and there was a baseball game that night. And yet, the FTLE report found nothing at Holder Park or the Orange Grove that implicated Crosley, including those shoe prints.

In the hours after the murder in 1989, officials brought in a canine dog named Zarr to track the scent that led along the shoe prints left in the sand of the park. If this was a trailing dog that was trained for specific scent and they had crossly green clothing and the dog trailed to the murder site that would be potentially a compelling piece of evidence but following just fresh scent from one location to another, I would say has very limited forensic value. Admittedly, I knew close to nothing about dog tracking in police cases. So as part of our investigation for this podcast, I wanted to talk to an expert.

Professor Kenneth Furtin is the executive director of the Global Forensic and Justice Center at Florida International University. Professor Furtin is an expert in what is known as canine olfaction. Olfaction meaning sense of smell. He told me in an investigation like this canines can either track or trail a scent, and there's a difference. The tracking piece is really following any person's scent, so it's just following human scent, and it's typically the canines trained to follow the freshest scent. Now trail is often more often used for specific human scent. So dogs can be trained to follow a scent article.

And so then if you have an article like a missing person or you have an article from a suspect, you present that to the dog and say, was that person here? And that's a separate trailing component. Because there was no scent article available for Tsar to trail a specific scent, the police dog handler just had Tsar track the freshest scent available. They saw footprints. They followed them working towards the tip of the toe to the heel. So they call it backtracking, following whether, assuming that person walked that way, will the dog to the heel, so they call it like back tracking, following whether the assuming that

person walked that way, will the dog follow the scent and the dog picked up a scent and followed it and on soft ground it's pretty easy to follow the scent and then it went on to harder surfaces onto concrete which becomes more difficult. Zar was shown the shoe prints and started tracking them south out of Holder Park. He followed the shoe prints from a dune area in the park to the edge of the paved road, but the shoe prints ended there, so Zahr continued to follow that scent until it led him to the front of Crosley's sister Tina's house, where Crosley often stayed. It was one of the most damaging pieces of evidence presented at Crosley's case.

During the 1990 murder trial, the defense pointed out that the dog handler stopped Zarr because there were two dogs in Tina's front yard, and that Zarr never finished tracking the scent. The dog handler admitted that they stopped Tsar's tracking to prevent a conflict with the two dogs. I asked Professor Furtin if it was proper procedure to stop tracking because of the presence of two dogs. Yeah, I believe so. It is appropriate to stop because you don't want

to get into an engagement with a well-trained police dog fighting with two other dogs. Even if the even if Zarr is not aggressive, you don't know if those dogs are aggressive. So I would have stopped my dog at that point as well. So we have no clue if Zarr might have kept going if Tina's dogs weren't in the front yard. And not only that, it's not clear what scent Zarr was tracking. Yeah, I mean, he tracked a scent. The dog tracked a scent, but it's not, uh, the,

it's not the scent. After Zarr tracked Holder Park, he was taken to the Orange Grove, the site of the murder, and where the main struggle took place. But Zarr was unable to pick up the Holder Park scent. In the dog handler's report, they said, quote, the orange grove in the area was checked and nobody had walked in the grove in the last couple of days.

What if I tell you, Dr. Furtin, that they were never able to, no matter how hard they tried, to connect the suspect, the defendant, to those particular shoe prints that they were following. Does that concern you? Yeah, because canines are a great tool to connect other pieces of evidence, but not as the primary evidence. That fresh scent could be anything, right? Correct. The canine wasn't following the scent of Crosley Green.

They were following the scent of somebody who could have been Crosley Green or another person. It wasn't, you know, the canines are not used as an identification tool in that role. With Audible, there's more to imagine when you listen. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. And Audible makes it easy to be inspired and entertained as a part of your everyday routine without needing to set aside extra time. As an Audible member,

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What it's gonna take for people to understand that I didn't kill this young man? What is it going to take for me to get a fair hearing in the lower courts? While Crosley's attorneys were fighting to get him a new trial, the days stretched into weeks. Weeks evolved into months, and months turned into years. Crosley had been on death row since he was 33 years old. Now at the age of 49, he had been living with a very real possibility of death by either lethal injection or the electric chair for 16 years. Life outside was moving on without him.

Crosley had long dreamed about the day he'd be reunited with his two sons, who were now grown men. There's a lot of things I want to do, but the first thing I want to do is to get my sons take off and go somewhere just where we'll be together, no one else. When we went and seen him, he was on death row. That's Shuma Stokes, Crosley's son. And it just like, you know, just like it wasn't enough time in the day.

You know, me and him, my brother Gaston, Gap, and my aunt Tina, we went and seen them. And it's just like when we got ready to leave, it just was like, you know, sad. You know, I ain't want to leave. Schumer was 16 and his brother Gaston, who they call Gap, was six when their father was sent away. I just didn't want to see him in that position. Did you worry that your dad might be executed? I mean, yeah. Yeah. And it's like, wow, this actually happening? We hear these stories every day.

And we like, oh, man, you ain't worried about it. But until it happened to yours, then that's when you take notice. And that's when you know it's for real. And then you find out there's really been some injustice being done. And that's how it was. You know, I was like,

I went off on a deep end for a while. And what about his brother Gaston? My brother took it to heart because he was young. He was real young. And for him to, what he had to go through, going through school being picked at, and not only him, my cousins, they went through it. The downstream or collateral consequences of one person's incarceration on his immediate and extended families, on communities, and even on society

cannot be understated. It just, it was rough for us to go through that, you know, because you got people calling your parent a murderer. He should die. I mean, kill him. I mean, man, we went through some stuff. And my brother, man, that messed him up. I mean, that messed him up pretty bad.

Even as an adult, Schumer says he struggles to control his emotions, alternating between anger, loss, and despair. By the mid-2000s, Crossley Green's legal battle had spanned nearly two decades. He was running out of options. But his luck was about to change. The sentencing phase in 1991, the prosecution while seeking the death penalty wrongfully used a prior conviction for robbery. That conviction when Crosley was 18 had actually been vacated, but Chris White still presented that prior felony to the jury and Crosley was sentenced to death. Now Crosley's attorney argued that the conviction should have remained sealed because

the judge ruled him a juvenile since he was younger than 19 and had erased the charge from his record. After years of appeals, the Florida Supreme Court finally issued a ruling in 2007 upholding his conviction, but agreeing that there was an error in sentencing and that Crosley should be resentenced. Crosley was now entitled to a new hearing on sentencing, but if he was going to get off death row, he needed the best of the best. The first moment I met Crosley, I met him and he came out in a orange jumpsuit,

shackled, hand, ankle, and around the waist. Meet defense attorney Keith Harrison. And we got, we went into a little room that was, it was probably about four feet by eight feet. And I told him that we would do everything we could to get him out of prison. I didn't know it at the time, but our 48 hours report had caught the eye of officials at the American Bar Association.

In 2008, the ABA's death penalty project sent a copy of our report to attorneys at Kroll & Morin, an international law firm renowned for its diversity among its lawyers. Their mission? To get Crosley Green off death row. On the case was Jean Thomas and Keith Harrison, both partners at Kroll & Morin in Washington, D.C. We looked at the record and um, and as a lawyer,

it just made me so angry, and we were just so offended that, you know, such a gross injustice had been done that we really wanted to, really wanted to work on it. Thomas has had a long history of litigating post-conviction death penalty cases. Keith Harrison, a former New York prosecutor, focuses on complex trials, arbitration, and investigations. It's worth noting that Harrison is a black man and possibly the only black lawyer to ever represent

Carlsly Green. It was pretty clear to the lawyers on our team that this wasn't just a case about the death penalty, this was a case about actual innocence. So first we pursued what's called habeas relief in state court, post-conviction relief in state court, where you challenge the constitutionality of the the trial and the sentencing. Then on August 31st, 2009, after 19 years facing execution, Crosley Green's attorneys won a major victory. Florida's 18th Judicial Circuit Court

re-sentenced Crosley to life in prison. When we got him off death row, you know, was really a big high because that's what we, that was our number one goal when we took on the case. Most of us don't know how we're going to die, but we also don't have to live with death hanging over us at any time. After years of living inside a six foot wide, nine foot long cell on death row, Crosley Green finally could begin thinking about a future.

How did he feel about that? For number one, I felt relieved. I felt relieved. When I say I felt relieved, I felt relieved for the fact that I do not have to worry now about them signing my warrant and I have to march over there and be on death watch. So I felt real good at that time,

that that was over with. But I know I have another hundred yards to go. How optimistic are you now that you will ever get out of here? How optimistic I am? I've spent many quite a few years on death row. So my best answer to that is that I still got hope that one day I'm going to go free. And I know I'm going to go free.

In the past, Crosley told me that his state-appointed lawyers rarely talked to him. But over the course of fighting for his release from Death Row, Harrison and Thomas really got to know Crosley, the man, not just the inmate. The first time I met Crosley on Death Row, I told him what we were trying to do and that we were going to try to get him off Death Row and introduce myself. And he said, I'm just excited to see you and I'm so glad you're here.

I was like, well, he's had other post-conviction lawyers and stuff. I wasn't sure what he's talking about. He said, look, I've been praying for God to send me for God to send me, you know, somebody that's gonna, you know, help me. I prayed to God to send me an angel and I know you're that angel. And when somebody says something like that to you, you know, it sets you back a little bit. Which is why they all stayed on Crosley's case even after getting him off death row and are now working on it pro bono. This is the only case I pray about and I pray about it almost every day. I look at this case as not a wait but an opportunity, an opportunity to do justice, do the right thing

for someone who really, really deserves, you know, everything I can and my firm can give him. So I just look at it as an opportunity, and I'm just gonna keep trying to press every button, pull every lever, and do everything I can to, you know, to win his freedom. every lever and do everything I can to, you know, to win his freedom. Keith Harrison thinks and has told the court that we're witnessing a case of what is known as a racial hoax, a racist narrative as old as time.

This is not just a simple case of mistaken identity that the wrong person got picked out of a lineup. On the next episode of Murder in the Orange Grove, the troubled case against Crosley Green. All of the evidence points to the fact that there was no third person at the scene of the crime. There was an accident, it would be fair to conclude, and she made up a story after the fact.

It's unfortunately a classic case of what is often referred to as a racial hoax, which is a black guy did it. Something went wrong. A witness said, oh, a black guy did it. And the prosecution pursued that theory of the case. Murder in the Orange Grove was reported by me, Erin Moriarty, alongside producers Alan Peng, Annie Cronenberg, and Alison Bailey. Kiara Norbitz is our coordinating producer, and Florence Burrow-Adams is our story editor.

Additional production support from Dylan Gordon, Marlon Policarp, Caroline Casey, and Christine Driscoll. Judy Tigart is the executive producer of 48 Hours, Gail Zimmerman, Asena Basak, Mark Goldbaum, Charlotte Fuller, Judy Rybak, and Stephen McCain produced the original 48 Hours episodes. Associate producers were Michael Loftus and Shaheen Toki. Patty Aronofsky was the senior producer. Special thanks to Megan Marcus, Jamie Benson,

Nick Poser, and Gail Spruill. If you like Murder in the Orange Grove, the troubled case against Crossley Green, you can listen to the next episode one week early and ad free by joining 48HoursPlus on Apple Podcasts or WondryPlus in the Wondry app. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondry.com slash survey. In 2014, Laura Hevelin was in her home in Tennessee when she received a call from California. Her daughter Erin Corwin was missing. The young wife of a Marine had moved to the California desert to a remote base near Joshua

Tree National Park. They have to alert the military and when they do, the NCIS gets involved. From CBS Studios and CBS News, this is 48 Hours NCIS. Listen to 48 Hours NCIS ad-free starting October 29th on Amazon Music.