One of America’s longest-serving death-row inmates has walked free following 31 years in prison after new DNA evidence cleared him.
Relieved Henry McCollum, 50, wiped away a tear as a senior judge overturned his conviction for the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl.
Supporters cheered outside court as Henry and his half-brother Leon Brown, 46, were acquitted of the attack thanks to evidence left on a cigarette found near the victim’s body.
It followed years of legal wrangling during which their defence team said they were forced to confess as investigators exploited their low IQs.
Henry was 19 at the time of Sabrina Buie’s killing, and Leon, who was sentenced to life behind bars, was just 15.
Henry became the longest-serving inmate on death row in North Carolina, which executes by lethal injection.
The men were released yesterday after the court heard the DNA found on the cigarette butt came from convicted murderer Roscoe Artis.
Superior Court Judge Douglas Sasser ruled that the new evidence from the case created significant doubt in the men’s conviction and contradicted evidence given at their original trial.
Judge Sasser said he was quashing their guilty verdicts “based on significant new evidence that they are, in fact, innocent”.
There were gasps of disbelief that the pair’s conviction was being overturned in the courtroom, which was packed with the men’s families.
Leon turned to his defence lawyers to shake their hands, while Henry stared around blankly.
Artis is serving a life sentence for a separate but remarkably similar rape and murder that occurred in the same small town of Red Springs three weeks after Henry and Leon were arrested.
He then lived a few hundred feet from the soya bean field in which Sabrina had been raped and smothered.
A day after her body was found, police arrested the two half brothers acting on a tip from a “confidential informant”.
It later turned out to be a 17-year-old girl at their school who had heard rumours they were involved in the crime.
Both boys were intellectually disabled, Leon so severely so that he could barely read or write.
After being interviewed both teenagers signed confessions that had been written for them by detectives of Red Springs police department.
In the confessions, they separately implicated each other and three other boys who had allegedly been their accomplices.
When police began to investigate the story, the other teenagers had alibis and no charges were brought.
Leon’s attorney Ann Kirby said: “This case highlights in a most dramatic manner the importance of finding the truth.”
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