19 May 2021 :
North Carolina Jury Awards Death-Row Exonerees Henry McCollum and Leon Brown $75M for Their Wrongful Capital Convictions.
In Raleigh, a federal jury has awarded two intellectually disabled death-row exonerees $75 million for the police misconduct that sent them to death row. On May 14, 2021, half-brothers Henry McCollum and Leon Brown were each awarded $31 million, $1 million for each year they spent in prison, plus an additional $13 million in punitive damages.
McCollum and Brown were 19 and 15, respectively, when they were arrested in 1983 on charges of raping and murdering 11-year-old Sabrina Buie. They were coerced into confessing, and police fabricated evidence against them while suppressing or ignoring evidence of their innocence. In 2014, they were exonerated after DNA evidence implicated Roscoe Artis, who has been convicted of a similar crime. McCollum and Brown’s youth and intellectual disabilities made them particularly vulnerable to manipulation and coercion by police.
After their exonerations, the brothers sought damages against the officers and government entities they said had violated their due process rights. They filed suit against officers from the Red Springs, North Carolina Police Department, the Robeson County Sheriff’s Office, and the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI). The Red Springs Police Department settled for $1 million in 2017. Robeson County agreed to a $9 million settlement on May 14, just before closing arguments began in the suit.
Toward the end of his closing argument, Hogan asked the jury to sit quietly for a minute and consider the minutes that passed slowly for McCollum and Brown over three decades. They’d lost more than 15 million minutes during their wrongful imprisonment.
After the jury announced the award, McCollum said, “I’ve got my freedom. There’s still a lot of innocent people in prison today. And they don’t deserve to be there.”
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/crime/article251411148.html
