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| Henry McCollum and Leon Brown |
LUMBERTON, N.C. — The most memorable moment of the trial that put Henry McCollum and Leon Brown behind bars for three decades for a hideous 1983 rape and murder was a display of brilliant courtroom theatrics.
District Attorney Joe Freeman Britt of Robeson County, who stood 6-foot-6 and came to be known as America’s “Deadliest D.A.,” asked jurors to try to hold their breath for five minutes — the time it took the 11-year-old victim to choke to death, after her killer stuffed her panties down her throat with a stick — to get a small sense of the horror she experienced.
The jury came back with two of the more than 40 death penalty convictions Mr. Britt won over almost two decades.
Those two convictions were obtained on the basis of inconsistent, soon recanted, confessions from two mentally impaired teenagers who said they had been coerced to sign statements written by interrogators, and testimony by an informer who previously did not implicate the two. They were overturned last week, and Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown were exonerated and set free.
Their release concluded a judicial horror story in which the two men were sent to death row though no physical evidence linked them to the murder. At the same time, a serial sex offender who lived less than 100 yards from the crime scene — and who, a few weeks after that murder, would kill a teenage girl nearby in strikingly similar circumstances — was never pursued as a suspect.
But if the case was finally closed, the episode reopened ugly memories of what critics say was a merciless criminal justice system that ran roughshod over helpless people for decades in this poor, sprawling, racially volatile county sometime known as the Great State of Robeson.
At the heart of that is the legacy of Joe Freeman Britt, who earned a spot in “Guinness World Records” and a “60 Minutes” profile for his prowess in sending people to death row.
[T]he McCollum and Brown case seems destined to become the signature one of Joe Freeman Britt’s tenure. And to critics, especially the current district attorney, it was remarkable what was overlooked: any pursuit of Roscoe Artis as a suspect.
Mr. Artis, who had already served prison time and committed violent sexual assaults, lived next to the soybean field in tiny Red Springs, where the victim was discovered. Investigators found a cigarette there which, at trial in 1984, Joe Freeman Britt implied belonged to one of the killers.
In fact, recent tests found that the cigarette had Mr. Artis’s DNA, setting off the process that led to the release of Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown.
Mr. Artis confessed to and was found guilty of raping and killing another teenage girl in similar circumstances four weeks after — and a short distance from — the murder Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown were charged with. He remains in prison. There is no sign that investigators or prosecutors pursued the theory that he might have killed both girls.
“What are the chances of this similar, if not same, crime occurring in this small town, and there not being a connection?” said Johnson Britt. “How could they not make this connection? The same prosecutor handled both trials, 90 days apart. I’m still dismayed.”
Also distressing, he said, were violations of the “Brady rule” requiring that exculpatory information be handed over to the defense. Three days before trial, the Red Springs police sought to test a beer can found at the scene for fingerprints of Mr. Artis and L. P. Sinclair, listing both as suspects. The can had two fingerprints, one from the victim, another from neither Mr. McCollum nor Mr. Brown. But mysteriously, tests for the other two men never were performed.
None of that was shared with defense lawyers, Johnson Britt said. Nor was the information that Mr. Sinclair, the informer who said Mr. McCollum had admitted killing the girl, had previously said he did not know anything about the murder, and a lie-detector test indicated he was telling the truth.
Another concern: the Red Springs police insisted for years that they no longer had any physical evidence. But this summer, Innocence Commission officials discovered evidence at the police station that included hair samples from the scene. No DNA from the newly found evidence matched Mr. McCollum’s or Mr. Brown’s.
