I've always been told there is racism in there!
"2 N.C. men exonerated after 30 years" by Jonathan M. Katz and Erik Eckholm | New York Times September 03, 2014
LUMBERTON, N.C. — Thirty years after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in rural North Carolina, based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, two mentally disabled half brothers were declared innocent and ordered released Tuesday by a judge there.
The case against the men, always weak, fell apart after DNA evidence implicated another man whose possible involvement had been somehow overlooked by the authorities even though he lived only a block from where the victim’s body was found, and he had admitted to committing a similar rape and murder at around the same time.
The startling shift in fortunes for the men, Henry Lee McCollum, 50, who has spent three decades on death row, and Leon Brown, 46, who was serving a life sentence, provided one of the most dramatic examples yet of the potential harm from false, coerced confessions and also of the power of DNA tests to exonerate the innocent.
As friends and relatives of the two men wept, a superior court judge in Robeson County, Douglas B. Sasser, said he was vacating their convictions and McCollum’s death sentence and ordering their release. The courtroom erupted into a standing ovation.
“We waited all these long years for this,” said James McCollum, the father of the man released from death row. “Thank you, Jesus,” he said.
The exoneration ends decades of legal and political battles about a case that became notorious in North Carolina and received nationwide discussion, vividly reflecting the country’s fractured views of the death penalty.
The two young defendants were prosecuted by Joe Freeman Britt, the 6-foot-6, Bible-quoting district attorney who was later profiled by “60 Minutes” as the country’s “deadliest DA” because he sought the death penalty so often.
For death penalty supporters, the horrifying facts of the girl’s rape and murder only emphasized the justice of applying the ultimate penalty. As recently as 2010, the North Carolina Republican Party put McCollum’s booking photograph on campaign fliers that accused a Democratic candidate of being soft on crime, according to The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C.
In 1994, when the US Supreme Court turned down a request to review the case, Justice Antonin Scalia described McCollum’s crime as so heinous that it would be hard to argue against lethal injection. But Justice Harry A. Blackmun, in dissent, noted that McCollum had the mental age of a 9-year-old and that “this factor alone persuades me that the death penalty in this case is unconstitutional.”
In the courtroom here Tuesday, the current district attorney, Johnson Britt (no relation to the original prosecutor), citing his obligation to “seek justice,” not simply gain convictions, said he would not try to reprosecute the men because the state “does not have a case.”
McCollum was 19 and Brown was 15 when they were picked up by the police in Red Springs, a town of fewer than 4,000 people in the southern part of the state, on the night of Sept. 28, 1983. The officers were investigating the murder of Sabrina Buie, 11, who had been raped and suffocated with her underwear crammed down her throat, her body left in a soybean field.
No physical evidence tied McCollum or Brown, both African-American, as was the victim, to the crime. But a local teenager cast suspicion on McCollum, who with his half brother had recently moved from New Jersey and was considered an outsider.
After five hours of questioning with no lawyer present and with his mother weeping in the hallway, not allowed to see him, McCollum told a story of how he and three other youths attacked and killed the girl.
“I had never been under this much pressure, with a person hollering at me and threatening me,” McCollum said in a recent videotaped interview with The News & Observer. “I just made up a story and gave it to them so they would let me go home.”
After he signed a statement written in longhand by investigators, he asked, “Can I go home now?” according to an account by his defense lawyers.
Before the night was done, Brown, after being told that his half brother had confessed and facing similar threats that he could be executed if he did not cooperate, also signed a confession. Both men subsequently recanted at trial, saying their confessions had been coerced.
--more--"
"N.C. death row inmate released" by Michael Biesecker | Associated Press September 04, 2014
RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina’s longest-serving death row inmate and his younger half-brother walked out as free men Wednesday, three decades after they were convicted of raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl who DNA evidence shows may have been killed by another man.
Henry 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.’’
Must be in their DNA.
Brown declined to be interviewed following his release, saying through his attorney he was too overwhelmed. He hugged his sister outside the prison before asking to go for a cheeseburger and milk shake.
‘‘We were just looking at each other and just smiling,’’ said Ann Kirby, one of Brown’s lawyers.
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.’’
Superior Court Judge Douglas Sasser overturned the convictions Tuesday. He said another man’s DNA being found on a cigarette butt left near the body of the slain girl contradicted the case put forth by prosecutors.
The ruling was the latest twist in a notorious case that began with what defense attorneys said were coerced confessions from two scared teenagers with low IQs. McCollum was 19 at the time, and Brown was 15. There was no physical evidence connecting them to the crime.
Defense lawyers petitioned for their release after a recent analysis from the discarded cigarette pointed to another man who lived near the Robeson County soybean field where Buie’s body was found. That man is already serving a life sentence for a similar rape and murder that happened less than a month later.
--more--"
Between the police killings and the false convictions that bubble up from the past is it any wonder I no longer believe in AmeriKan ju$tice that has one standard for a certain select chosen set of interests and another for the rest of us?
I hate to say it, but the whole $y$tem is geared toward arrest and conviction to "solve" cases when less than half are solved and the rest tainted.
