North Carolina Governor Formally Pardons Two Death Row Exonerees

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory grant­ed par­dons to Leon Brown (l.) and Henry McCollum (cen­ter, r.), allow­ing the two men to receive com­pen­sa­tion for their wrong­ful con­vic­tions. Brown and McCollum are half-broth­ers who were con­vict­ed of the 1983 mur­der of an 11-year-old girl and sen­tenced to death. McCollum spent 30 years on death row before being exon­er­at­ed by DNA evi­dence in 2014. Brown was released after 30 years in jail, eight of them on death row. At the time of their arrests, Brown was 15 and McCollum 19. Both gave coerced con­fes­sions. An inves­ti­ga­tion by the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission found DNA at the crime scene from a man who was in prison for a sim­i­lar crime com­mit­ted just a month lat­er. Upon grant­i­ng the par­dons to Brown and McCollum, McCrory said, ​“This has been a very com­pre­hen­sive and thought­ful process dur­ing the past nine months. Based upon the avail­able evi­dence that I have per­son­al­ly reviewed, I am grant­i­ng par­dons of inno­cence to Henry McCollum and Leon Brown. It is the right thing to do.” A review board may now deter­mine whether to grant each man up to $750,000 in compensation.

Brown and McCollum are two of the ten peo­ple exon­er­at­ed from death row since January 2014, with 153 exon­er­at­ed since the death penal­ty was rein­sti­tut­ed in the 1970s. In 1994, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia sin­gled out his case as one in which the per­pe­tra­tor should be exe­cut­ed; twen­ty years lat­er, the evi­dence showed that the wrong men had been con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death.

(B. Mims, ​“McCrory par­dons for­mer death row inmates cleared in 1983 mur­der,” WRAL, June 4, 2015; Photos by Jenny Warburg.) See Innocence and New Voices.