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Wednesday 3 September 2014

Innocent Brothers Who Spent 30 Years On Death Row Wrongly Convicted Of Raping & Killing 11-Year-Old Girl Finally Walk Free

A North Carolina judge overturned the convictions Tuesday of two men who have served 30 years in prison for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl after another man’s DNA was recently discovered on evidence in the case.
Superior Court Judge Douglass Sasser ordered the immediate release of Henry McCollum, 50, and Leon Brown, 46. The half brothers were convicted in the 1983 slaying of Sabrina Buie in Robeson County.

Lawyers for the men petitioned for their release after DNA evidence from a cigarette butt recovered at the crime scene pointed to another man. That man, who lived close to the soybean field where the dead girl’s body was found, is already serving a life sentence for a similar rape and murder that happened less than a month later.
At 9:10 p.m. on Sept. 28, 1983, a sheriff’s detective knocked on the door of Henry McCollum’s home and invited the 19-year-old to the Red Springs Police Department for questioning. An hour and a half later, his brother, Leon Brown, and their mother went to the station to see what was taking so long.
Within a few hours, agents had in hand a five-page murder confession from McCollum detailing how he and three other teenagers had gang-raped an 11-year-old girl in a Robeson County bean field and then jammed her panties down her throat with a stick.
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By dawn, agents had in hand a similar confession from Brown, 15. Police wrote the confessions in longhand; Brown and McCollum signed each page.
Those two confessions, the only evidence against the brothers, have kept them locked up for the past 30 years, 11 months and two days. Both men are mentally disabled; McCollum with an IQ in the 60s, Brown scoring as low as 49. McCollum and Brown have said they were bullied and tricked into confessing. They have maintained their innocence of the rape and murder of Sabrina Buie.
No one in authority believed them: police, prosecutors, jurors, judges. Even McCollum’s lawyers at his second trial browbeat him to admit guilt.
MCCOLLUM-NE-081214-TELHenry McCollum who is on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh has spent more than three decades in prison for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl three decades in prison. McCollum is poised for freedom after investigators linked DNA at the crime scene to a Robeson County man serving life for a similar rape murder.TRAVIS LONG — tlong@newsobserver.com |

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McCollum has been housed for decades on North Carolina’s death row at Central Prison in Raleigh. Brown is assigned to Maury Correctional Institution, a high security prison in Greene County.
Sasser ruled after a day-long evidence hearing during which Sharon Stellato, the associate director North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, testified about three interviews she had over the summer with the 74-year-old inmate now suspected of killing Buie.
Robeson County District Attorney Johnson Britt acknowledged the DNA discovery in court papers. He said evidence from the original trial is being tested again and he hasn’t decided whether he will retry McCollum and Brown.
Buie was found in a rural soybean field, naked except for a bra pushed up against her neck. A short distance away, police found two bloody sticks and a cigarette butt.
Authorities said McCollum, who was 19 at the time, and Brown, who was 15, confessed to killing Buie. Attorneys said both men have low IQs and their confessions were coerced after hours of questioning.
There is no physical evidence connecting them to the crime. The DNA from the cigarette butts doesn’t match either of them, and fingerprints taken from a beer can at the scene aren’t theirs either. Lawyers for the two men said the new testing leaves no doubt about their clients’ innocence.
Ken Rose, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham, has represented Henry McCollum for 20 years.
“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,” Rose said. “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.”
Leon Brown and his attorney his lawyer Ann Kirby recite the Lord's Prayer after a visit at the Maury Correctional Institution in Maury, N.C. Tuesday, August 26, 2014. Brown and his brother were incarcerated 15 years old when he was arrested for rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in late September 1983. He was sentenced to death spent several years on death row as the youngest prisoner there at age 16. He was retried and is now serving a life sentence for rape. Brown is scheduled to appear Tuesday in the Robeson County Courthouse where defense lawyers in asking a judge to free him and his brother Henry McCollum. District Attorney Johnson Britt is not opposing, as there has never been any evidence against him except for a confession he claimed was bullied and tricked out of him. CHUCK LIDDY — cliddy@newsobserver.com 
McCollum, 50, hugged his weeping parents at the gates of Central Prison in Raleigh, a day after a judge ordered his release, citing the new evidence in the 1983 slaying of 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. There's not anger in my heart. I forgive those people and stuff. But I don't like what they done to me and my brother because they took 30 years away from me for no reason. But I don't hate them. I don't hate them one bit."
Through his attorney, Brown declined to be interviewed following his release.
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, McCullum 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.'
Upon his release, McCollum expressed his belief that there are still other innocent men on the inside. He is at least the seventh death row inmate freed in North Carolina since 1976, the year the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court.
'It's very painful when you are attached to somebody like a brother or family, and you see that person on his last days,' McCollum said. 'A lot of them don't really want to die. ... And it hurt me the most to see the state take somebody's life, when they are committing murder their own self. But they don't see it that way.'
McCollum said he won't allow himself to focus on the past, on all the life in the outside world he missed. He plans to someday work with young people, to try to keep as many as he can from ever ending up inside a prison.
But first, he has a lot of learn about a world that has changed dramatically during the three decades he has been away. McCollum hasn't never accessed the Internet, or owned a cellphone. He looked ill at ease Wednesday in a tie and white dress shirt, the collar at least an inch too large. Inmates on death row all wear bright red jumpsuits, indicating their status as convicted murders.
Climbing into his father's car, he put his head through the loop of the seatbelt that is supposed to cross the chest. He had never used one like it. A TV cameraman had to help him buckle it.
'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.'
Judge Sasser yesterday said he was vacating McCollum and Brown's convictions and ordering their release 'based on significant new evidence that they are, in fact, innocent.'
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia also used the case as an example of why he supported the death penalty in legal arguments over an unrelated case in 1994. He wrote: 'For example, the case of an 11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat. How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!'
Family members of the men gasped and some sobbed as the judge announced his decision to the packed courtroom. Brown smiled and shook a defense lawyer's hand and McCollum looked spent and relieved
'We waited years and years,' said James McCollum, Henry McCollum's father. 'We kept the faith.'
Defense lawyers petitioned for their release after a recent analysis from the butt pointed to another man who lived near the soybean field where Buie's body was found in Robeson County. That man is already serving a life sentence for a similar rape and murder that happened less than a month later.
Because of paperwork, it will likely take until Wednesday for the men to walk free, said Keith Acree, spokesman for the state prison system. They are required to return to the prisons where they have been serving time before they can be processed out.

Leon Brown and his attorney his lawyer Ann Kirby recite the Lord's Prayer after a visit at the Maury Correctional Institution in Maury, N.C. Tuesday, August 26, 2014. Brown and his brother were incarcerated 15 years old when he was arrested for rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in late September 1983. He was sentenced to death spent several years on death row as the youngest prisoner there at age 16. He was retried and is now serving a life sentence for rape. Brown is scheduled to appear Tuesday in the Robeson County Courthouse where defense lawyers in asking a judge to free him and his brother Henry McCollum. District Attorney Johnson Britt is not opposing, as there has never been any evidence against him except for a confession he claimed was bullied and tricked out of him. CHUCK LIDDY — cliddy@newsobserver.com |Buy Photo

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/08/30/4105707_on-death-row-tormented-by-watching.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/08/30/4105707_on-death-row-tormented-by-watching.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy
Mamie Brown, left, mother of Henry McCollum and Leon Brown and Leon Brown in an undated photo, but not long before Leon Brown was locked up. COURTESY OF BROWN FAMILY
Freedom: Geraldine Brown, sister of Leon Brown, celebrates outside a Robeson County courtroom where her brothers were declared innocentFreedom: Geraldine Brown, sister of Leon Brown, celebrates outside a Robeson County courtroom where her brothers were declared innocent
The men's freedom hinged largely on the local prosecutor's acknowledgement of the strong evidence of their innocence.
'The evidence you heard today in my opinion negates the evidence presented at trial,' Johnson Britt, the Robeson County district attorney, said during a closing statement before the judge announced his decision. Britt was not the prosecutor of the men.
Even if the men were granted a new trial, Britt said: 'Based upon this new evidence, the state does not have a case to prosecute.'
Minutes later, Sasser made his ruling.
The day-long evidence hearing included testimony from Sharon Stellato. The associate director of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission discussed three interviews she had over the summer with the 74-year-old inmate, who was convicted of assaulting three other women and now suspected of killing Buie. The Associated Press does not generally disclose the names of criminal suspects unless they are charged.

Prison: In a June 10, 1987 photo, Leon Brown sits in the day room of his Death Row cell block in Raleigh, NC's Central Prison. On Tuesday, lawyers said DNA analysis of a cigarette butt found at the crime scene link it to a man serving a life sentence for a similar rape and killingPrison: In a June 10, 1987 photo, Leon Brown sits in the day room of his Death Row cell block in Raleigh, NC's Central Prison. On Tuesday, lawyers said DNA analysis of a cigarette butt found at the crime scene link it to a man serving a life sentence for a similar rape and killing
According to Stellato, the inmate said at first he didn't know Buie. But in later interviews, he said the girl would come to his house and buy cigarettes for him.
The man also told them he saw the girl the night she went missing and gave her a coat and hat because it was raining, Stellato said. He told the commission that's why his DNA may have been at the scene. Stellato said weather records show it didn't rain the night Buie went missing or the next day.
Stellato also said the man repeatedly told her McCollum and Brown are innocent.
Still, he denied involvement in the killing, Stellato said. He said the girl was alive when she left his house and that he didn't see her again. Buie was found in a rural soybean field, naked except for a bra pushed up against her neck. A short distance away, police found two bloody sticks and cigarette butts.

In a 1987 photo, District Attorney Joe Freeman Britt sits in his office during an interview in Lumberton, N.C. Britt has acknowledged that the new DNA evidence is consistent with this other man
In a 1987 photo, District Attorney Joe Freeman Britt sits in his office during an interview in Lumberton, N.C. Britt has acknowledged that the new DNA evidence is consistent with this other man

The DNA from the cigarette butts doesn't match Brown or McCollum, and fingerprints taken from a beer can at the scene aren't theirs either, attorneys say. No physical evidence connects them to the crime.
Both were initially given death sentences, which were overturned. At a second trial, McCollum was again sent to death row, while Brown was convicted of rape and sentenced to life.
Lawyers for the two men said the new testing leaves no doubt about their clients' innocence.
'We were very hopeful that it would come out this way. We knew the strength of it,' said James Payne, an attorney for Brown.
Ken Rose, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham, has represented Henry McCollum for 20 years.
'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,' Rose said.
He also credited Britt for making the right choice.
'I give him a tremendous amount of credit. I think a lot of prosecutors would not have done what Mr. Britt did today,' he said after the hearing.
The men's cousin, 52-year-old Ted Morrison of Jersey City, New Jersey, walked out of the courthouse and exclaimed: 'Free at last! Thank Robeson County they are free at last.'
Still, he said the result was bittersweet for his family and for Buie's.
'There are no winners. Because they lost somebody, and we lost two people 30 years.'



ead more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/08/30/4105707_on-death-row-tormented-by-watching.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

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