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| Henry McCallum and Leon Brown |
The exoneration of two North Carolina men who spent 30 years in prison — one on death row — provides a textbook example of so much that is broken in the American justice system. And it is further evidence (as though more were needed) that the death penalty is irretrievably flawed as well as immoral.
The crime was so horrific that it has echoed for decades through North Carolina politics and beyond. In 1994, after Justice Harry Blackmun of the Supreme Court announced that he opposed capital punishment in all circumstances, Justice Antonin Scalia cited the Buie murder as a case where it was clearly warranted. “How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!” he wrote.
On Tuesday, a state judge ordered both men freed after multiple pieces of evidence, some of which had never been turned over to defense lawyers, proved that neither Mr. McCollum nor Mr. Brown was responsible for the crime. DNA taken from a cigarette found at the crime scene matched a different man, Roscoe Artis, who is already serving life in prison for a similar murder committed just weeks after Sabrina Buie’s killing.
Virtually everything about the arrests, confessions, trial and convictions of Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown was polluted by official error and misconduct.
No physical evidence linked either man to the crime, so their false confessions, given under duress, were the heart of the case the prosecutors mounted against them. Both men’s confessions were handwritten by police after hours of intense questioning without a lawyer or parent present. Neither was recorded, and both men have maintained their innocence ever since.
Equally disturbing, Mr. Artis was a suspect from the start. Three days before the murder trial began, police requested that a fingerprint from the crime scene be tested for a match with Mr. Artis, who had a long history of sexual assaults against women. The test was never done, and prosecutors never revealed the request to the defense.
It was not until 2011 that the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, an independent state agency that had taken on the men’s case, discovered the old fingerprint request. The commission also found that multiple statements in the two confessions were inconsistent with each other and with the facts of the crime. In July, the commission finally got the full case file and matched the DNA to Mr. Artis.
Source: The New York Times, The Editorial Board, Sept. 4, 2014
Related article:
- "DNA Evidence Clears Two Men in 1983 Murder", The New York Times, Sept. 2, 2014.
NC inmate to adjust to life outside after 30 years
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| Henry McCollum sitting in a courtroom in Lumberton, N.C. after a judge overturned his conviction and that of his half-brother Leon Brown in the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl,citing DNA evidence that they are innocent. |
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — After walking out of prison for the first time in three decades, former death row inmate Henry McCollum tried to climb into his father's car but put his head through the loop of the seatbelt that is supposed to cross his chest. A TV cameraman showed him how it works.
The safety gear isn't all that's changed since the 50-year-old McCollum and his younger half brother were sent away for a 1983 rape and killing that new DNA evidence shows they likely did not commit.
McCollum has never accessed the Internet or owned a cellphone. And he looked ill at ease Wednesday in a tie and white dress shirt, the collar at least an inch too large, shedding the red jumpsuit he wore in his cell. His relief was obvious, though.
"Right now I want to go home and take a hot bath," McCollum said. "I want to see how that tub feel. And eat. I want to eat. I want to go to sleep and wake up the next day and see all this is real."
McCollum hugged his weeping parents at the gates of Central Prison in Raleigh, a day after a judge ordered his release, citing new DNA evidence in the 1983 slaying of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie. His half brother, 46-year-old Leon Brown, was later freed from Maury Correctional Institution near Greenville, where he had been serving a life sentence.
"I knew one day I was going to be blessed to get out of prison, I just didn't know when that time was going to be," McCollum said. "I just thank God that I am out of this place"
During his long years on death row, McCollum watched 42 men he describes as brothers make their last walk to the nearby death chamber to receive lethal injections. If not for a series of lawsuits that has blocked any executions in North Carolina since 2006, McCollum would have likely been put to death years ago.
He often lay awake at night in his solitary cell, thinking of the needle.
"I'd toss and turn at night, trying to sleep," he said. "Cause I thought ... these people was going to kill me."
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Source: SF Gate, Sept. 4, 2014