Almost 25 years after being sentenced to life in prison, one of the two men accused of killing Michael Jordan’s father maintains his innocence, and may be closer than ever to seeing another day in court.

Attorneys for Daniel Green filed paperwork accusing law enforcement of tampering with evidence related to the shirt James Jordan wore when he was killed on July 23, 1993, per the Associated Press.

The filing comes inside of the 60-day window a superior court judge granted Green’s attorneys upon their request for a new trial in April, which included questions of further juror and police misconduct. And it comes six months after Green’s lawyers submitted paperwork to the superior court theorizing that that the arresting sheriff covered up evidence that linked his son to the alleged murder scene.

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On the night in question, James Jordan reportedly pulled off the highway just south of Lumberton, N.C., around 2:30 a.m., to rest midway through the long drive home to Charlotte from his hometown of Wilmington, where he had attended funeral services earlier in the evening. It was there, in a red Lexus, he was fatally shot by Green and Larry Demery in a senseless carjacking, prosecutors posited.

The body was found in a South Carolina swamp on August 3, 1993. The car was discovered stripped 48 hours later and determined to be James Jordan’s after a weeklong investigation. The Jordan family then filed a missing-persons report, and the body was identified as Michael Jordan’s father on Aug. 13.

By midnight the next day, Robeson County Sheriff Hubert Stone had pegged Green and Demery for the murder. Police had traced phone calls made from James Jordan’s cell phone inside the car to a friend of Green’s. Both men first claimed the other happened upon the already deceased body on the side of the road, up the street from a motel, and they’ve both since pinned the shooting on one another.

Green was sentenced to life in prison in 1996, when Demery testified his friend shot Jordan once in the chest at close range as he slept in the Lexus. Demery’s plea bargain made him eligible for parole two weeks ago. All the while, Green maintained his innocence, despite admitting to driving the car, wearing a watch and replica championship ring the Chicago Bulls legend gave his father — evidence that was captured on video Green took from Jordan’s camera — and helping to dispose the body.

Suspicions about the handling of the case emerged almost immediately and included conspiracy theories that James Jordan’s murder was somehow related to a drug deal gone wrong or his son’s gambling proclivities. Despite the Hall of Famer’s adamant denial of those accusations, GQ writer Scott Raab wrote a heavily researched article laying out the suspicious investigation in great detail.

“James Jordan, a fast-living man with a 1985 felony conviction for taking a kickback, business debts and gambling problems of his own, father of the most celebrated man on the planet, disappears for three weeks, during which time his birthday falls, and nobody — not his wife and not the world-famous son who considered him a best friend — files a missing-person report,” Raab wrote in 1994. “He winds up shot dead in the dark of hell’s backyard, dumped into a swamp in another state and burned as an anonymous pauper. His car is found sixty miles away, where the police take nearly a week to identify it. His widow says he called three days after he supposedly died. Within forty-eight hours of his identification, a backwoods sheriff produces two of an endless supply of blank, born-violent minority youths and puts them on trial for their lives after another open-and-shut investigation of another random killing in Robeson County.”

In 2010, James Jordan’s case was one of almost 200 determined to have been mishandled by the State Bureau of Investigation’s crime lab. During his trial, Green’s attorneys found the lack of blood in the car laughable, and an outside review of the evidence almost 15 years later revealed the SBI never disclosed tests that showed there was no conclusive evidence of any blood in the car whatsoever.

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