Debora Green - After Conviction

After Conviction

After her sentencing Green continued to maintain that her recall of the night of the fire was limited. In the summer of 1996, she wrote to her daughter claiming that she had taken more than the recommended doses of her medications that night. Similar letters to Michael Farrar varied from claims that she had no recollection of the night to firmly stating that she was innocent of the arson. She theorized that Margaret Hacker had set fire to the family's house, and reiterated her claim from the show-cause hearing that Tim had been the one to poison his father. Green wrote to author Ann Rule in 1996 asserting that, due to alcohol abuse, she had not had the mental capacity to start a fire. In a later interview with Rule, she blamed her cloudy thinking during the court hearings on her Prozac prescription, and stated that once she was off the drug, her mind became much clearer.

In 2000, represented by a new legal team, Green filed a request for a new trial on the basis of having been rendered incompetent by the psychiatric medications she was taking at the time of her hearings. She alleged that her original attorneys had failed to represent her adequately, instead focusing on avoiding a trial and the death penalty. She withdrew the request when prosecutors determined that they would seek the death penalty if a new trial was awarded. When, in 2004, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled the state's death penalty unconstitutional, she filed a second request for a new trial based on a claim of "manifest injustice". Green's attorneys claimed that new scientific techniques invalidated the evidence that the fire had been caused by arson. The request was denied in February 2005.