Two North Carolina men who were convicted of the brutal rape and
murder of an 11-year-old girl in 1983 were exonerated yesterday
after new DNA evidence proved their innocence.
The men, Henry Lee “Buddy” McCollum and Leon Brown, are
stepbrothers. McCollum, 19 at the time of the crime, was sentenced
to death and spent 30 years on North Carolina’s death row, making
him one of the longest serving death row prisoners in the state.
Brown, 15 at the time of the crime, was also sentenced to death but
was later retried and sentenced to life in prison. Both men are
considered
mentally disabled—McCollum’s IQ is between 60 and 69 and
Brown’s IQ is 49.
Recent DNA testing of a cigarette butt found near the scene of
the crime implicated convicted rapist and murderer Roscoe Artis,
who lived a few hundred feet from the field where the body of the
11-year-old victim, Sabrina Buie, was found. Artis is currently on
death row in North Carolina for the
rape and murder of 18-year-old Joann Brockmann—a crime he
committed less than a month after McCollum and Brown were arrested.
Despite the fact that both murders were carried out in a similar
way (both girls were raped, asphyxiated, and left in fields),
within a month of one another, and in a town of roughly 4,000
people, Artis was never even considered as a suspect in the Buie
murder.
No physical or forensic evidence tied either McCollum or Brown
to the crime, either. Instead, their convictions were largely based
on confessions written by police, which the men signed. In
a recent video
interview with Raleigh’s The News & Observer,
McCollum said, “I just made up a story and gave it to them so they
would let me go home.”
According to the Innocence Project, roughly
30 percent of defendants exonerated by DNA evidence gave false
confessions, falsely incriminated themselves, or pled guilty to
crimes they did not commit.
Both men later recanted their confessions and said they were
coerced. At his trial, McCollum
recanted his confession 226 times.
The prosecutor on the case, Joe Freeman Britt, who was once
listed in Guinness World Records as the “deadliest prosecutor”
after winning 46 death row cases.
Known for his theatrics in court, Britt famously held the
courtroom in a silence for five minutes during McCollum and Brown’s
trial to emphasize how long it took Buie to suffocate.
McCollum and Brown’s innocence was proven only after the
North Carolina
Innocence Inquiry Commission, a state agency established in
2006 “to investigate and evaluate post-conviction claims of factual
innocence, decided to take on their cases.
Before then, McCollum and Brown’s guilt was never questioned.
Indeed, McCollum was even
used as an example by United States Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia to justify the death penalty. In 2010, the North
Carolina Republican Party sent around
campaign mailers containing McCollum’s mug shot before the
state’s general election, attacking state Democrat’s support for
the Racial Justice Act.
Now retired, Britt
told The News Observer last Friday he still has no
doubts over the men’s guilt. “You find a cigarette, you say it has
Roscoe Artis’ DNA on it, but so what? It’s just a cigarette, and
absent some direct connection to the actual killing, what have you
got? Do you have exoneration? I don’t think so,” said the man whose
prosecution relied solely on confessions written by police and
signed by mentally disabled teenagers.
Defense attorneys say McCollum was the last person prosecuted
by the “deadliest prosecutor” who remained on death row.
According to
The New York Times, McCollum and Brown’s release from
prison “provided one of the most dramatic examples yet of the
potential harm from false, coerced confessions and of the power of
DNA tests to exonerate the innocent.” I’d go a step further and
argue their innocence (or at least McCollum’s) demonstrates, once
again, just how broken the death penalty is in the United States.
Isn’t it time for it to
just die already?
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