Former Death-Row Prisoners Freed In North Carolina

On September 2, 2014, Leon Brown (above) and Henry McCollum (below) were exon­er­at­ed and released from prison in North Carolina.

The two men, who are half broth­ers, had been con­vict­ed of the rape and mur­der of an 11-year-old girl and sen­tenced to death in 1984. Brown was 15 at the time of the crime and McCollum was 19. Both men have intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ties and were inter­ro­gat­ed under duress until they con­fessed to the crime. In 2010, Brown turned to the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission for help. The Commission test­ed DNA evi­dence from the crime scene, which impli­cat­ed a man who was con­vict­ed of a sim­i­lar crime. Robeson County Judge Douglas Sasser vacat­ed the men’s con­vic­tions and said the evi­dence indi­cat­ed their inno­cence. District Attorney Johnson Britt sup­port­ed their release and said no fur­ther charges will be brought against them.

“It’s ter­ri­fy­ing that our jus­tice sys­tem allowed two intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled chil­dren to go to prison for a crime they had noth­ing to do with, and then to suf­fer there for 30 years,” said Ken Rose, a senior staff attor­ney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham, who has rep­re­sent­ed McCollum for 20 years. ​“Henry watched dozens of peo­ple be hauled away for exe­cu­tion. He would become so dis­traught he had to be put in iso­la­tion. It’s impos­si­ble to put into words what these men have been through and how much they have lost.”

Brown’s sen­tence had pre­vi­ous­ly been reduced to life in prison, but McCollum remained on death row for more than 30 years. Before his release, he had been the longest-serv­ing pris­on­er on North Carolina’s death row.

Death penal­ty sup­port­ers had long point­ed to McCollum’s case as an exam­ple of why the United States should have the death penal­ty. When Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1994 in Callins v. Collins that he had con­clud­ed the death penal­ty was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al and ​“I no longer shall tin­ker with the machin­ery of death,” Justice Antonin Scalia respond­ed by deri­sive­ly ques­tion­ing why Blackmun had not select­ed McCollum’s case as the vehi­cle for that announce­ment. Describing the facts of the mur­der for which McCollum was wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed, Justice Scalia wrote: ​“How envi­able a qui­et death by lethal injec­tion com­pared with that!” In 2010, the North Carolina Republican Party used the case in a polit­i­cal attack ad, plac­ing McCollum’s mug shot on cam­paign fliers that accused a Democratic can­di­date of being soft on crime.