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Thread: Henry Lee McCollum - North Carolina

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    Henry Lee McCollum - North Carolina


    Henry Lee McCollum



    Facts of the Crime:

    Leon Brown and his half-brother, Henry Lee "Buddy" McCollum, then 19, abducted 11-year-old Sabrina Buie near Red Springs in September 1983. They took her to some woods, raped and sodomized her, cut her with a knife and, as she whimpered for her mother, discussed how to kill her.

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    SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

    HENRY LEE McCOLLUM v. NORTH CAROLINA

    on petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court of North Carolina

    No. 93-7200. Decided June 30, 1994

    The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.

    Justice Blackmun , dissenting.

    Henry Lee "Buddy" McCollum is sentenced to be executed for his part in a brutal crime. He participated with three other young men in the rape and murder of an 11-year old girl. Each raped the child, and McCollum helped hold her down while another young man stuffed her panties down her throat with a stick. When I announced in Callins v. Collins, ___ U. S. ___, ___ (1994) (Blackmun, J., dissenting from the denial of certiorari), that I had reached the conclusion that the death penalty, as currently administered, is unconstitutional, Justice Scalia questioned why I did not choose Buddy McCollum's case as the vehicle to announce that position. Id., at ___ (Scalia, J., concurring in the denial of certiorari). He seemed to believe that my position would be harder to defend in a case that like this one that "cries out for punishment." State v. McCollum, 334 N. C. 208, 245, 433 S. E. 2d 144, 165 (Exum, C.J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). Far from it. The crime indeed is abhorrent, but there is more to the story.

    Buddy McCollum is mentally retarded. He has an IQ between 60 and 69 and the mental age of a 9-year old. He reads on a second grade level. This factor alone persuades me that the death penalty in his case is unconstitutional. See Penry v. Lynaugh, 492 U.S. 302, 350 (1989) (Stevens, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (executions of the mentally retarded are unconstitutional).

    The sentencing jury found two aggravating circumstances, that the murder was committed to avoid arrest and that the murder was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel. It found seven mitigating circumstances: that McCollum was mentally retarded, that he had difficulty thinking clearly under stress, that he was easily influenced by others, that he committed the felony murder under the influence of mental or emotional disturbance, that he had cooperated with the police, that he had no significant history of prior criminal activity, and that he had adapted well to prison. In addition, the trial judge concluded that "[a]ll of the evidence tends to show that [McCollum's] capacity . . . to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform to the requirements of law was impaired." McCollum was 19 at the time of the crime.

    Along with these compelling mitigating circumstances, the evidence at trial tended to show that Buddy McCollum was far from the most culpable of the four accomplices. He was not the one who initiated the rape, the one who proposed the murder, or the one who actually committed the murder. Nonetheless, he was the only one convicted of murder and the only one sentenced to die.

    North Carolina's death penalty scheme requires appellate proportionality review, N.C.G.S. §15A 2000(d)(2), and the Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court found himself compelled to conclude that the death penalty for Buddy McCollum was disproportionate. 334 N. C., at 248, 433 S. E. 2d, at 167-168 (Exum, C.J., dissenting). North Carolina jurors had never before recommended death for a defendant whom they had found mentally retarded. Only once had jurors recommended death where there was even any evidence of mental retardation. No North Carolina jury ever had recommended death for a felony murderer under 20 years of age. Nor had any jury recommended death ina sexual offense felony murder where there was evidence of the defendant's mental and emotional disturbance, not even where the defendant was the actual perpetrator of an especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel killing.

    That our system of capital punishment would single out Buddy McCollum to die for this brutal crime only confirms my conclusion that the death penalty experiment has failed. Our system of capital punishment simply does not accurately and consistently determine which defendants most "deserve" to die.

    http://www.doc.state.nc.us/NEWS/2001...arver_stay.htm

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    Motion says Roscoe Artis killed Buie

    LUMBERTON — A motion to dismiss convictions against two men imprisoned for the 1983 rape and murder of a Red Springs girl points the finger at another man who is also incarcerated for a rape and murder in the same town.

    The motion, filed at the Robeson County courthouse on Tuesday, asks that convictions against 50-year-old Henry Lee McCollum and 46-year-old Leon Brown be dismissed and that they be released from prison immediately. Put forth by the Center for Death Penalty Litigation and lawyers representing the men, the motion is expected to be heard in Robeson County Superior Court next week.

    McCollum is currently on death row for the rape and murder of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie, and Brown is serving a life sentence for her rape. Brown was originally on death row for her murder, but a second trial cleared him of that charge.

    According to the motion, tests results from LabCorp show that DNA on a cigarette butt found near Buie’s body matched DNA belonging to Roscoe Artis, a 74-year-old currently serving a life sentence for the rape and murder of an 18-year-old girl in Red Springs about a month after Buie’s death.

    According to the motion, none of the physical evidence found at the scene — including a stick used to stuff Buie’s underwear down her throat until she suffocated, match sticks and beer cans — can be linked to Brown, McCollum or two other men implicated by confessions they gave police in 1983. Little physical evidence was presented in McCollum and Brown’s original 1984 trials, or their subsequent retrials in 1991 and 1992. A rape kit collected after the crime did not trace back to any suspects.

    Artis was wanted for the rape and murder of a girl in Gaston County when he moved to Red Springs in 1983, and had a record of assault stretching back to 1957. According to the motion, he lived “within feet” of where Buie’s body was found in a soybean field off of Richardson Street.

    When Joann Brockman went missing on Oct. 22, 1983, witnesses told investigators they had seen her with Artis. Artis confessed that night to police and helped lead them to her body, which showed evidence of being bludgeoned with a large stick, the motion said. Artis later testified that he had not volunteered the statement, but was convicted in August 1984.

    While serving time, Artis spoke often with a former death row inmate named Andrew “Sonny” Craig. According to an affidavit from Craig included in the motion, Artis had told him McCollum and Brown were not involved in Buie’s death and relayed details about that crime scene.

    “During my time with Mr. Artis, he seemed burdened by living with guilt for so long,” Craig said in the affidavit. According to the motion, Craig knew Artis before his incarceration and met McCollum at Central Prison in Raleigh. Brown was originally confined in Central Prison and has since been transferred to Maury Correctional Institution. Artis is being held at Warren Correctional Institution.

    The motion suggests Artis nearly became a suspect in Buie’s case and claims evidence of his involvement was ignored by investigators.

    According to the motion, the Red Springs Police Department on Oct. 5, 1984, requested that the State Bureau of Investigation compare fingerprints lifted from the scene of Buie’s murder with Artis’. According to the motion, “there is no documentation reflecting that the comparison was carried out,” and exactly one year later, the request was canceled.

    McCollum and Brown’s lawyers are arguing that the prosecution suppressed evidence favorable to the defense. The motion cites a box of evidence from the case found at the Red Springs Police Department years after it had been asked to turn over all related material. The box was found by the associate director of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, an independent body which carried out the 2010 request by Brown to run DNA tests.

    “Based on these due process violations alone,” the motion says, “Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown are entitled to have their convictions vacated.”

    Furthermore, the lawyers allege, the confessions that were the basis of the men’s conviction on Oct. 25, 1984, were coerced.

    McCollum was one of many people interviewed after Buie’s body was found. On Sept. 28, the motion says, he was brought in and questioned by two agents with the State Bureau of Investigation, Ken Snead and Leroy Allen, and then sheriff’s deputy Kenneth Sealey.

    “Over four hours, Agents Snead and Allen and Deputy Sealey used the detailed information they already had about the case to prompt one confession from Mr. McCollum and a second more detailed confession which Agent Snead reduced to writing,” the motion said.

    McCollum signed the confession and helped draw a map of the crime scene. Later that night, Brown signed a similar confession. The handwritten statements are included in the motion, which says recordings were not made of the confessions.

    “In the end it took little effort for Agents Snead and Allen and Deputy Sealey to persuade intellectually-disabled 19-year-old Mr. McCollum to sign and initial a confession with a promise that he could leave,” the motion said.

    Throughout their trials, McCollom and Brown were deemed “intellectually disabled.” The results of IQ tests conducted on Brown, who was 15 at the time, were widely cited, along with estimates of his reading comprehension and mental age. In 1995, McCollum challenged his conviction, arguing, among other things, that mental retardation made him unfit to stand trial. Brown at the time was the youngest person to receive the death penalty.

    “After 30 years in prison for a crime they did not commit,” the motion said, “the only fair remedy is Mr. McCollum’s and Mr. Brown’s discharge based on evidence of their innocence.

    The hearing is scheduled for 10 a.m. on Tuesday.

    http://www.robesonian.com/news/break...is-killed-Buie

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    I am really conflicted about this case. Another convicted rapist/murderer's DNA is found beside the victim's body on a cigarette butt. There is no video of the confession and his intellectual ability seems to be quite low. I think what may have happened is that a couple of seasoned officers interrogated this man for hours and he finally relented and confessed.

    If there are any trial documents, or other evidence to support his guilt, that anyone could find, I would appreciate if you could post them for me.....because, as I said, I am conflicted.
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
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    And, who were the other two who were supposedly involved in the attack? -Dawn

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    This is a court document about the case:

    http://www.leagle.com/decision/19884...0v.%20McCOLLUM
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

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    I still don't get it. Darrel Suber led her from her home, and someone named Chris shoved the panties down her throat? Who are they and what happened to them??

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    DNA evidence could free 2 men in 1983 case

    By Joseph Neff
    The Charlotte Observer

    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.

    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.

    Brown and McCollum finally have the evidence strong enough to refute their 1983 confessions. The N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission has unearthed DNA evidence showing the killer was a sexual predator with a lengthy criminal history, including a similar rape and murder in Red Springs one month after the arrest of Brown and McCollum.

    The brothers are scheduled to appear Tuesday in the Robeson County courthouse, where defense lawyers will ask a judge to free them both. District Attorney Johnson Britt is not opposing the request.

    “The whole case rests on the confessions,” Britt said, “and the DNA evidence threw those confessions under the bus.”

    The saga of Henry McCollum and Leon Brown has been one of the most notorious criminal cases in North Carolina history. U.S. Supreme Court justices, while deciding not to hear McCollum’s case, traded barbs about wild teen killers. The Republican Party used McCollum in scary campaign mailings.

    And despite a number of criminal justice reforms in recent years, the case raises many questions: How common are false confessions? How many inmates have boxes of evidence hidden from them for decades? How does the justice system treat the mentally disabled? Were the brothers put on death row because of police and prosecutorial tunnel vision, or something worse? How many innocent inmates languish in the state’s penal system?

    The story of Henry McCollum and Leon Brown is well-documented in court files, police records and evidence recently uncovered by the Innocence Inquiry Commission. It is a stark tale of a prosecution gone wrong.

    Fingerprint on a can

    The brothers were born in Jersey City, N.J., where their mother, Mamie Brown, had migrated from Robeson County. The boys were reared by their grandmother in the Montgomery Garden housing project in Jersey City. Schools identified each boy as mentally challenged early on; both went to special education classes.

    McCollum was reading at a second-grade level when he dropped out of school. Brown could barely read or write. By 1983, the brothers had moved back to Robeson County with their mother.

    On Sept. 25, Ronnie Buie, a textile worker, filled a missing persons report for his 11-year-old daughter, Sabrina. A family friend found her body in a soybean field, nude except for a bra pushed up on her neck. Bruises and scrapes on the girl’s back showed she had been dragged into the field. Police found evidence in a nearby field: bloodstained sticks and a plywood board, a cigarette butt and three beer cans. One can had Sabrina Buie’s fingerprint.

    Another had a fingerprint that did not match McCollum or Brown.

    Police canvassed Red Springs. On the evening of Sept. 28, State Bureau of Investigation agent Ken Snead and Robeson County Sheriff’s detective Ken Sealey interviewed a 17-year-old girl who said she heard at school that Henry McCollum was the killer, and that two other men may have been involved. The girl said she heard that McCollum had robbed a pimp in Jersey City and had tried to rape a local girl a year ago.

    Within hours, three officers were interrogating McCollum: Snead, Sealey and Leroy Allen of the SBI . Snead wrote out the confession in longhand, and McCollum signed it.

    The written confession was horrifying. Four young men – Darrell Suber, Chris Brown, Leon Brown and McCollum – took the girl into the woods, it said. The confession said they stripped off her shoes, pants and panties, held her down and took turns raping her vaginally and anally. Worried that she would tell police, Suber said, “We’ve got to kill her to keep her from telling the cops on us.”

    Chris Brown took a stick and shoved Buie’s panties down her throat with a stick until she suffocated, according to the confession, which was replete with details known only to someone familiar with the crime scene. They left three empty 16-ounce Schlitz Bull Malt Liquor cans in the field. Buie wore a white shirt with a flower on it. Chris Brown smoked Newports in the field.

    When the interrogation ended at 2:30 a.m., McCollum started to walk out of the police station. Asked where he was going, McCollum said police told him he could leave when the interview was over.

    Around 7 a.m., Leon Brown signed all seven pages of a similar confession in a labored block print.

    ‘Yelling and screaming at me’

    For the past three decades, McCollum and Brown have maintained their innocence. Both say they didn’t know what they were signing.

    “I’d never been under such pressure, people yelling and screaming at me,” McCollum said in a recent interview at Central Prison. “I was scared, and was just trying to get out of that police station and go home.”

    Snead, the lead investigator who interrogated McCollum, is now retired. He said he believes that the confessions are true.

    “We didn’t have a cause of death, and McCollum and Brown both told me they took a stick and juked the panties up and down her throat,” Snead said in an interview Thursday. “Only someone who committed the crime would know that.”

    Allen, one of the SBI agents present during McCollum’s interview, had led the investigation of the crime scene and had attended the autopsy the day before.

    Four days after the confessions, the 17-year-old who provided the original tip told police she had no personal knowledge that McCollum was the killer; she only suspected it because McCollum didn’t act right, riding a bicycle around staring at people, mostly women.

    ‘God got your judgment’


    At trial, McCollum and Brown faced District Attorney Joe Freeman Britt, a dogged, flamboyant courtroom showman keen on quoting the Bible and flaunting the bloody clothes of murder victims before jurors.

    Guinness World Records listed Britt as the world’s deadliest prosecutor, responsible for more death sentences than any other. (He is not related to current District Attorney Johnson Britt.)

    When McCollum took the stand, Joe Freeman Britt steamrolled him. The older brother was a confusing and bumbling witness, often contradicting himself or failing to understand basic questions.

    But McCollum is proud of one thing about the 1984 trial: He never wavered under the red-hot cross examination of the world’s deadliest prosecutor.

    McCollum denied guilt and recanted the confession 226 times as Britt worked through the confession word by word.

    “Did you tell him, ‘Sabrina started hollering, ‘Mommy, Mommy’? ” Britt asked. “Did you tell him that?”

    “No,” McCollum said.

    “Didn’t that touch your soul at all when that little girl was down on the ground hollering?”

    “It didn’t touch my soul because I didn’t kill nobody.”

    “It doesn’t touch your soul now, does it?”

    “Because I ain’t killed nobody. I want to tell you something, Joe Freeman, God got your judgment right in hell waiting for you.”

    When the judge admonished him for wanting to the leave the witness stand, McCollum was quick with a response: “Do you feel how I feel, to get hanged in the courtroom for something I didn’t do?”

    Britt later described his closing argument on CBS’ “60 Minutes” in a segment dubbed “The Deadliest DA.”

    “I asked (the jury) to time with me five minutes, and I just sat down. I asked them, if they wanted to, to try to hold their breath as long as they could and to think about, to do – to do the things that the law required them to do – that is, reflect upon and analyze and think about the facts of the case, to think about the little girl in the woods and, what horrible experiences she had there, how they sodomized her and raped her and kicked her and beat her and cursed her, all the time her begging for mommy.

    “It was a long five minutes.”

    Many coerced confessions

    A confession is one of the most powerful pieces of evidence a prosecutor can put before a jury. After all, who in their right mind would give a detailed confession to a crime he did not commit?
    Quite a few, it turns out.

    Brandon Garrett, a University of Virginia law professor, has analyzed all 317 cases of people proven innocent by DNA in the U.S. Sixty-three cases – 18 percent – involved false confessions. Trial transcripts, police files and court records show that in almost all the false confessions, the accused gave rich detailed evidence about the crime, not just flat proclamations of “I did it.” In most cases, investigating officers – knowingly or inadvertently – provide details to the suspects.

    There are three big risk factors for false confessions, Garrett said. The cases of Brown and McCollum have all three.

    The brothers are mentally disabled. Many studies have shown how the mentally disabled are susceptible to pressure and stress and tend to be submissive and eager to please those in authority. Youth is a similar risk factor; juveniles are similarly vulnerable to pressure or coercion from authority figures.

    And there is no video or audio recording of the interrogation.

    “It’s extremely troubling that nothing is documented as to what exactly these men said to police,” Garrett said. “They should be able to describe what they did.”

    The confessions had a glaring weakness baked into them: Prosecutors never brought charges against the two alleged ringleaders, Darrell Suber and Chris Brown. Police had no evidence to bring charges.

    A death row friend

    Brown and McCollum were the youngest people on death row, both physically and mentally, according to Sonny Craig, a death row inmate who acted as a mentor and minister. Craig took the brothers under his wing and told other inmates that he was their protector. At 16, Leon Brown was the youngest person on death row.

    “They both have a child’s mind,” Craig said in a recent interview. “They are both very, very slow.”

    Craig said he suspected that another death row inmate, Roscoe Artis, was the guilty party. Artis was convicted of the rape and murder of 16-year-old Joann Brockmann, whose naked, beaten body was found in Red Springs one month after Brown and McCollum were arrested.

    Artis was convicted in Robeson County one month before McCollum and Brown went to trial. Joe Freeman Britt was the prosecutor, and Artis was represented by the same lawyer who would represent McCollum, Earl Strickland.

    Artis often spoke about the murder of Sabrina Buie, Craig said, on death row and later at Warren Correctional Institution.

    “He had to talk with somebody he could trust, to get it off his chest,” Craig said. “He kept telling me, ‘I know those boys aren’t guilty.’ I told him, ‘If they aren’t guilty, why don’t you come forth?’ He didn’t say nothing but, ‘I’ve got to go. I’ve got somewhere to go,’ and he’d leave my cell.”

    Convicted again

    In 1988, the state Supreme Court ordered new trials for McCollum and Brown.

    McCollum was appointed two experienced death-penalty lawyers, Jim Fuller and Marshall Dayan. The lawyers, believing the jury would want to blame someone for the vicious murder, decided McCollum should admit guilt in hopes of getting a second-degree murder conviction.

    McCollum insisted he was innocent. In a 1995 affidavit, Dayan said he met with McCollum 10 times before trial, trying to get him to admit guilt. McCollum refused each time.

    On the day before trial, Dayan and Fuller ratcheted up the pressure, telling McCollum his confession could be the difference between life and death, and that he needed to confess to Faye Sultan, their expert psychologist.

    “I have used the word ‘coerced’ to describe how we pressured Henry into adopting our view of the trial,” Dayan said. “It is an accurate one.”

    In an affidavit, Sultan said McCollum was “particularly susceptible to approval seeking and persuasion when interacting with authority figures,” but he had always insisted on his innocence. She was perplexed when, on the eve of his 1991 trial, he gave her disjointed, confused and inconsistent “confessions.” He was under extreme stress and showed signs of deepening depression.

    The jury found McCollum guilty and returned him to death row.

    At Brown’s 1992 retrial, a judge threw out the murder charge and gave him a life sentence for rape. After the state Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 1995, Brown had effectively exhausted his appeals.

    Little happened in their cases for the next 15 years.

    Brown said he has spent the years in a half-dozen state prisons, walking, learning to read and watching news and sports on television. For years he was able to make an annual visit to Central Prison to see his brother through steel bars, but that ended two years ago. They have written to each other monthly.

    For McCollum, death row has meant watching friends led off to execution – 42 since he entered Central Prison in 1984.

    “I’m tired,” McCollum said. “I don’t know when they are going to kill me.”

    Delivering a bombshell


    In 2010, a fellow inmate told Brown about the Innocence Inquiry Commission, which in February 2010 had declared Greg Taylor innocent of a 1993 murder – the country’s first exoneration by an independent commission. Brown wrote the commission and received a form in the mail.

    The same inmate filled out the form and mailed it. In a recent interview, Brown said he did not know the name of the inmate who helped him.

    The application prompted the commission to begin an investigation.
    Commission staffers declined to discuss the case. But the commission staff has conducted an exhaustive investigation, according to Johnson Britt and defense lawyers.

    In July, commission staffers delivered a bombshell: The DNA on the Newport cigarette butt at the crime scene matched Roscoe Artis. They also compiled Artis’ lengthy record as a sexual predator.

    Artis, with previous convictions for attempted rape, moved to his sister’s house in Red Springs in 1983. At the time, there was a warrant out for his arrest for the 1980 rape and murder of Bernice Moss in Gastonia. Moss’ killing resembled those of both Sabrina and Brockmann; nude except for a shirt and bra, Moss had been beaten with a stick, and something was lodged in her throat. After Artis was on death row, charges in the Moss murder were dropped.

    Given the murder of Brockmann in Red Springs, Artis’ criminal history, and that he lived with his sister next to the soybean field where Sabrina’s body was found, why wasn’t he a suspect in Sabrina’s murder?

    “That’s a good question, and it’s a question I don’t have an answer for,” said Johnson Britt, the current district attorney.

    Joe Freeman Britt, now retired, said Friday he has no doubts the confessions are genuine and the men are guilty: “None. None.”

    Britt said he doesn’t put much stock in DNA exonerations.

    “You find a cigarette, you say it has Roscoe Artis’ DNA on it, but so what?” Britt said. “It’s just a cigarette, and absent some direct connection to the actual killing, what have you got? Do you have exoneration? I don’t think so.”

    The Innocence Inquiry Commission investigation also turned up hidden evidence. Three days before McCollum and Brown went on trial in 1984, the Red Springs police requested that the SBI examine the unidentified fingerprint on the beer can to see if it matched Roscoe Artis.

    The SBI never did the work.

    The police request was evidence that Artis was a suspect in the case. Britt said it was a “bad violation” of Supreme Court rulings that require prosecutors to hand over all helpful evidence to defendants.

    Earlier this month, a commission investigator found a box of evidence in the Red Springs Police Department, despite repeated claims by the department in 2010 that it had none. The box contained fingernail clippings from Sabrina, a beer can, hair samples, swabs and other potential sources of DNA evidence.

    McCollum, now 50, said he was devastated to learn about Artis. They had become close during their time in the Robeson jail and on death row.

    “He was like a father to me,” McCollum said.

    Brown, 46, struggled to explain his feelings about Artis or the possibility of freedom after 30 years.

    But on Monday, he engaged in what may have been his first optimistic act in decades: He threw out all the letters from his brother.

    “To keep from having a lot of mail toting with me when I leave.”

    http://www.charlotteobserver.com/201...l#.VAYYzPssKUk

    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

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    Half-brothers convicted in 11-year-old's 1983 murder ordered set free

    LUMBERTON, N.C.
    — A judge in Robeson County on Tuesday ordered that two half-brothers – imprisoned for 30 years for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl – be set free from prison after newly discovered evidence shows someone else likely was responsible for the crime.

    Superior Court Judge Douglas Sasser overturned the convictions of Henry Lee McCollum, 50, and Leon Brown, 46, for the September 1983 death of Sabrina Buie based on DNA analysis of a cigarette butt found at the crime scene.

    Buie was found dead in a Red Springs soybean field, naked except for a bra pushed up against her neck. A short distance away, police found the cigarette butt as well as two bloody sticks.

    McCollum, who was 19 at the time, and his half-brother Brown, who was 15, confessed to killing Buie. Both men were initially given death sentences, which were overturned. At a second trial, McCollum was again sent to death row, where he remains, while Brown was convicted only of rape and sentenced to life.

    A review of the case by the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission uncovered the DNA evidence, which, test results showed, were linked to another man who's currently serving life in prison for a similar rape and murder.

    McCollum and Brown's family members – some of whom hadn't seen the men since they were convicted – packed the Robeson County courtroom for Tuesday's daylong hearing. They were elated by Sasser's ruling.

    It wasn't immediately clear Tuesday afternoon when the two men would be released.

    Defense attorneys argued that there was no physical evidence connecting McCollum and Brown to Buie's death – fingerprints on a beer can found at the crime scene also couldn't be matched to them.

    Both men have low IQs, their attorneys said, and their confessions – the only evidence against them – were coerced after hours of questioning.

    Instead, the DNA from the cigarette matches Roscoe Artis, 74, who is serving a life sentence for the rape and murder of an 18-year-old woman just a few miles away, prosecutors and defense attorneys agree.

    Artis also was convicted of assaulting three other women over 30 years before his last conviction. The fingerprint on the can found near Buie had not been checked with his prints a week before the hearing was set to begin.

    District Attorney Johnson Britt acknowledged the DNA discovery in court papers, saying evidence from the original trial is being tested again. Prior to Tuesday's hearing, he said he hadn't decided whether he would take the men to trial if their convictions were overturned.

    Complicating matters even more was the discovery last month of a box of evidence from the original trial at the small Red Springs police station that authorities thought was lost.

    http://www.wral.com/half-brothers-co...free/13943907/
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  10. #10
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    Henry McCollum hugged his step mother Priscilla McCollum after being released from Central Prison in Raleigh, N.C., on Wednesday.


    Death Penalty Overturned, North Carolina Man Is Released From Prison

    By JONATHAN M. KATZ
    The New York Times

    RALEIGH, N.C. — Henry Lee McCollum had barely slept in days, terrified that his dream of 31 years — being released from North Carolina’s death row for a crime he did not commit — might not come true.

    But finally on Wednesday morning, after one more night of delays, he was driven out of the concertina-wire gates of the central prison in Raleigh, and to the waiting arms of his parents.

    “I just thank God I’m out of this place,” Mr. McCollum, 50, said. “Now I want to eat, I want to sleep, and I want to wake up tomorrow and see that this is real.”

    Despite a judge’s order Tuesday declaring them innocent in a 1983 rape and murder of a child, Mr. McCollum and his half brother, Leon Brown, remained in custody overnight as officials processed the paperwork for their release. But Mr. McCollum finally left the prison around 9:42 a.m. on Wednesday and Mr. Brown, 46, who had been serving a life sentence, was expected to be released this afternoon from another prison in eastern North Carolina, according to his lawyers.

    James and Priscilla McCollum, Henry’s father and stepmother, began to cry and shout for joy as the son they call Buddy stepped out in a houndstooth jacket, khaki pants and slate blue tie he’d been given by the lawyers who helped secure his release. The team, from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, began weeping and hugging as well. Standing a free man in fresh air for the first time in his adult life, Mr. McCollum swatted away gnats as he faced a phalanx of television cameras. He told the reporters that his faith in God had sustained him through years of fear that the legal system that had wrongly incarcerated him would also wrongly take his life.

    Mr. McCollum also spoke of the 152 men still on death row in the state prison, whom he called his family.

    “You’ve still got innocent people on North Carolina death row,” he said. “Also you’ve got some guys who should not have gotten the death penalty. That’s wrong. You got to do something about those guys.”

    Finally free, Mr. McCollum, who like Mr. Brown is mentally disabled (Mr. Brown’s IQ in tests has registered as low as 51) faces the challenge of his life: learning to live in a world he has not experienced since he was a teenager three decades ago. On death row, Mr. McCollum was never allowed to open a door, turn on the light switch, or use a zipper. He never had a cellphone, and until last week had not used the Internet. (He excitedly told his stepmother about his first use of Google Maps days ago, when he saw pictures of her house.)

    When he got into the family car, a navy Dodge Journey, he sheepishly slipped the beige shoulder belt around his neck and let it hang, unsure of how to use it.

    The lawyers with the Center for Death Penalty Litigation said that there was no plan to seek redress or to secure money for training from the state to assist with his reintegration into society.

    “It’s not like being on probation or parole. It’s just — good luck,” said Gerda Stein, the center’s director of public information.

    For now Mr. McCollum’s father, James, said he wanted to get his son back home to the small town of Bolivia, near Cape Fear.

    “We’re going to go home to Bolivia, take a shower,” he said. “Then I’m going to say, ‘Do you want to go fishing? I’m going to teach you how to fish.'” As he got in the driver’s seat to leave, James McCollum put on a hat that said “Jesus Is My Boss.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/us...h-row-dna.html

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