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| Henry McCallum spent 30 years on North Carolina's death row before being exonerated by DNA tests. |
As McCollum finally walked free on Tuesday, folks in Davidson County might have remembered his face from a particularly despicable campaign leaflet the North Carolina Republican Party mailed out in 2010.
The target of the mailing was the then-majority leader of the state General Assembly, Democrat Hugh Holliman. The state GOP was desperate to unseat him in its effort to take control of the legislature. The party proceeded to show just how low a Dixie Republican can go.
“Thanks to Hugh Holliman, death row inmates could leave prison early and move in next door,” the leaflet said. “Meet your new neighbors…You’re not going to like them very much.”
Beside the mug shot of McCollum was one of a man named Wayne Laws. The leaflet announced:
“Meet Wayne Laws. He brutally MURDERED TWO PEOPLE. And get to know Henry McCollum. He RAPED AND MURDERED AN 11 YEAR OLD CHILD. Both are on Death Row today.”
The leaflet went on:
“But thanks to ultra-liberal Hugh Holliman, they might be moving out of jail and into Your neighborhood sometime soon.”
Holliman’s supposed sin was to have voted in favor of the state’s new Racial Justice Act, which permitted condemned murderers to cite demographics in seeking to get their death sentences commuted.
But the law explicitly stated that a resulting life sentence was to be without even the possibility of parole.
The leaflet was thus a lie, though that was hardly surprising in politics.
What was remarkable was that the Republicans were directing this particular smear at someone whose 16-year-old daughter had been abducted, raped, and murdered by an intruder when she was home from school with the flu.
Source: The Daily Beast, Michael Daly, Sept. 9, 2014