Four years after intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled broth­ers Henry McCollum and Leon Brown were exon­er­at­ed of the 1983 rape and mur­der of an 11-year-old girl in North Carolina, jurors in McCollum’s case met with mem­bers of his defense team and reflect­ed on how they sen­tenced an inno­cent man to death. In a September 6 op-ed in the Raleigh News & Observer, Kristin Collins — Associate Director of Public Information for North Carolina’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation and a for­mer News & Observer reporter — writes that the jurors’ respons­es var­ied from relief, to shame, to fear of God’s wrath, to tears at he pain of even think­ing about the case. ​“All [the jurors] were denied the infor­ma­tion they need­ed to reach a fair ver­dict,” Collins observed. ​“I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out, where did we go wrong?,” one juror told Collins. ​“I feel like we got duped by the sys­tem,” he said. McCollum and Brown — age 19 and 15, respec­tive­ly, at the time Sabrina Buie was raped and mur­dered — were con­vict­ed and con­demned for her death in 1984. The main evi­dence against them were coerced con­fes­sions obtained dur­ing pro­longed inter­ro­ga­tions. Brown spent eight years on death row before the Supreme Court declared the death penal­ty uncon­sti­tu­tion­al for chil­dren under age 16, and his sen­tence was reduced to life impris­on­ment. But McCollum remained on North Carolina’s death row for more than 30 years, hav­ing lost of all his court appeals, until DNA evi­dence uncov­ered by the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission dis­closed that nei­ther he nor Brown had raped and killed the young girl. At the time of his release in 2014, McCollum was North Carolina’s longest-serv­ing death-row pris­on­er. The op-ed sheds light on how the grue­some facts of the case pro­duced an unjust ver­dict and death sen­tence. Jurors recalled the graph­ic crime-scene pho­tos and McCollum’s con­fes­sion, which it turns out had been writ­ten by the police. ​“Even McCollum’s defense attor­neys admit­ted his guilt, believ­ing the jury would spare him if he accept­ed respon­si­bil­i­ty,” Collins writes. One juror believed that if McCollum was on tri­al, he’d prob­a­bly done it: ​“his biggest regret,” Collins wrote, ​“is that he trust­ed pros­e­cu­tors to tell the truth.” And what the jury did not know was of over­whelm­ing impor­tance. ​“No one told the jury that anoth­er, almost iden­ti­cal crime was com­mit­ted just a month after the girl’s mur­der — and that the cul­prit was not McCollum, but a man who lived by the field where her body was found,” Collins writes. ​“The jury didn’t know fin­ger­prints were found at the scene, and that none of them were McCollum’s. They didn’t know the case against McCollum start­ed with a rumor from a teenage girl, who lat­er admit­ted she made it up.” Collins reports that the jurors ​“remem­bered McCollum at the defense table, silent and unre­spon­sive, like a con­fused and bro­ken child.” One seemed espe­cial­ly remorse­ful. ​“I should have fol­lowed my con­science,” she said. ​“I hope he can forgive me.”

(Kristin Collins, He spent 30 years in prison. How did jurors get it wrong?, September 6, 2018.) See Innocence.

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