MACON, Ga. — Twiggs County Sheriff Darren Mitchum says they began weaving together Charles Rowland’s confessions, and the facts of the two crimes. That’s why, after 17 months, Roland Green is now out on bond.
"You just look at this and go, this poor guy Green who ends up being maligned and being put in prison for 17 months and you wonder where has our prosecution system gone wrong,” said Mercer law professor David Oedel.
With little to no evidence and more than a year of jail time behind him, Oedel says Green was caught up in a system gone wrong.
"This guy didn’t get a trial, this guy Mr. Green, what happened to him is he was accused because he had some proximity to the household where the boarding house where this was," Oedel said.
Twiggs County's sheriff says Charles Rowland recently confessed to several murders, including the three Green was charged with.
"Generally speaking, people don’t fess up to these crimes and it suggests to me there are people in prison right now who are serving time for crimes that they did not really commit," he said.
Christina Cribbs is a senior attorney with the Georgia Innocence Project, a non-profit that works to correct and prevent wrongful convictions.
"People should be very concerned when we have situations where we have individuals are being put in jail when our elected officials, our law enforcement, our prosecutors are admitting there is not sufficient evidence to hold them. That is very concerning," she said.
She says regardless of when the cases are corrected, the conviction will always follow the accused.
"Just because it's corrected before conviction does not mean that there aren’t consequences for that person that’s wrongfully accused. They’re losing their family, their job, their house. It’s just devastating,” Cribbs said.
We asked to speak to both Sheriff David Davis and District Attorney Anita Reynolds Howard about why Green was indicted and what was the evidence against him.
Neither one responded.
Howard's office did put out a statement saying that they now have an ethical responsibility to ask the court to dead docket those murder charges against Green. That means, those charges are put on hold, and won't be prosecuted.
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