Wrongfully Convicted NC Brothers Get $75M In Civil Rights Case

RALEIGH, NC — During the nearly 31 years Henry McCollum served time on a North Carolina prison’s death row, wrongfully convicted of the brutal rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl, 42 inmates were executed.

For most of those years, he had no reason to think he wouldn’t be next.

On Friday, McCollum celebrated his freedom.

“I’ve got my freedom,” he said after a federal jury in a Raleigh courtroom awarded him and his half brother, Leon Brown, $31 million each in compensatory damages for convictions they maintained for decades had been coerced, The News & Observer reported.

“There’s still a lot of innocent people in prison today,” McCollum said. “And they don’t deserve to be.”

Raleigh defense attorney Elliot Abrams, said the brothers — wrongfully convicted not once, but twice — had been “demonstrably and excruciatingly wronged.”

The eight-person jury’s award represents $1 million for each year McCollum and Brown, both of whom are intellectually disabled and have IQs in the mid-50s, spent in prison for the 1983 rape and murder of Sabrina Buie, a girl who lived in Red Springs.

The brothers also received $13 million in punitive damages and $9 million in a settlement with the Robeson County Sheriff’s Office, one of the defendants in a civil case.

In 2017, three years after they were exonerated of the crimes, the town of Red Springs settled a civil lawsuit for $1 million.

The North Carolina Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty says McCollum and Brown were teenagers living in rural Robeson County when Sabrina’s body was found in a soybean field near their mother’s home.

Their arrests were based on little more than a rumor repeated by a high school student, who pointed out McCollum, 19 at the time, was visiting his mother and brother from New Jersey and that he behaved differently from other students, likely because of his intellectual disability, according to the Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, among the groups that have championed the brothers’ cause.

When officers showed up at his mother’s house, McCollum went voluntarily to the police station. He was kept in an interrogation room until late at night as officers grilled him about the crime, promising him he could go home if he gave them details of the crime — which police had supplied him with during the interrogation.

After 4½ hours, McCollum buckled. He repeated the details the officers had provided him, signed a confession they had written and signed it, even though he could barely understand what had been written, according to the anti-death penalty group in North Carolina.

McCollum did embellish. He “invented” details about the rape and said his younger brother Leon Brown, 15, at the time, and two friends were there “to share responsibility for the awful crime.” Leon Brown and his mother were already at the police station, ready to pick up McCollum.

Brown, the more profoundly disabled of the two brothers, was unable to read the confession he signed, the Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty pointed out. The details were different from those in his brother’s statement, and police later determined the friends McCollum said had been involved couldn’t possibly have been there.

“Yet, these two confessions — coerced, conflicting and patently false — became the evidence that prosecutors would use to send two innocent, poor, Black, disabled teenagers to death row.”

The brothers recanted their confessions, but were nevertheless convicted and sentenced to death row after their 1984 trial. They were granted a new trial in 1991, but their retracted confessions were again used as evidence against them and both were found guilty. Brown’s death sentence was overturned, and he was re-sentenced to life in prison. McCollum was sentenced again to death.

The brutality of the crime McCollum was falsely accused of committing was cited by the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in defense of the death penalty. Pro-death penalty legislative candidates used his image on their flyers. When McCollum and Brown were released from prison in 2014, McCollum had been North Carolina’s longest-serving death row inmate.

The brothers got a break when the North Carolina Innocence Commission agreed to look into the case at Brown's urging. Investigators were stunned to learn that police knew at the time fingerprints found at the science didn’t match those of either of the two brothers, but they didn’t attempt to match them to the fingerprints of other suspects.

In fact, there were no other suspects.

That’s in spite of the fact that a few weeks after Sabrina Buie’s body was discovered in the soybean field, police discovered the body of 18-year-old Joann Brockman in a field. Like Sabrina, she had been raped and asphyxiated before her body was left in the field, which happened to adjoin the residence of Roscoe Artis, who had a long history of assaults against women, the Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty said.

The Innocence Commission investigators used modern DNA testing on the clothing, beer cans, cigarette butts found near Sabrina’s body, finding no DNA linking the brothers. But the DNA on one cigarette butt did match Artis’, though.

They were cleared of any involvement in the girl’s murder in 2014 and released from prison. In 2015, they filed civil lawsuits against law enforcement officials involved in their arrest, arguing their civil rights were violated during the interrogations that resulted in their arrests

Abrams said in a statement the brothers had waited decades “for recognition of the grave injustice” inflected on them by law enforcement, and noted that “a jury … has finally given Henry and Leon the ability to close this horrific chapter of their lives.”

“They look forward to a brighter future surrounded by friends, family and loved ones,” Abrams said.