Vol. 78/No. 33      September 22, 2014

Henry McCollum, 50, and his half brother Leon Brown, 46, were convicted in 1983 for the rape and murder of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie. Both were sentenced to death, but Brown’s sentence was reduced to life after they won retrials in the early 1990s. A state superior court judge overturned their convictions Sept. 2.

McCollum was 19 and Brown 15 at the time of their trial, in which no physical evidence linking them to the crime was presented. Central to the prosecution’s case were confessions from both young men that their attorneys maintain were coerced. Both men are mentally disabled.

The prosecution alleged a cigarette at the crime scene was that of the defendants, but recent tests found the DNA on the cigarette was from Roscoe Artis, who is serving a life sentence for a similar rape and murder of another woman four weeks after Buie was killed.

In addition, the prosecution never gave defense attorneys evidence that called into question their clients’ guilt. “I was told that the police file on Henry’s case had been lost,” Kenneth Rose, McCollum’s attorney for the last 20 years, wrote in the Sept. 5 Charlotte Observer, “so I could not tell how much evidence police had to ignore to pin this crime on two disabled boys with no history of violence.” Prosecutors finally turned over the file this year.

Despite the controversy surrounding the conviction of McCollum and Brown, the case was cited by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 1994 as justification for the death penalty. “How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared to that,” Scalia wrote, after describing Buie’s rape and brutal murder, in a decision declining to review a Texas death-penalty case.

Attorneys for the two men plan to seek pardons. A pardon would allow each to claim up to $750,000 compensation for wrongful conviction.

After his release, McCollum expressed his support for the 152 men still on death row in North Carolina. While in prison he watched 42 men taken to execution. McCollum himself would likely have been executed if not for a series of lawsuits that have held off North Carolina executions since 2006.

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

Since 1989, 312 people in 36 states have been exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing.

Cruel and unusual punishment
The exoneration of McCollum and Brown comes in a year when several botched lethal-injection executions have made it easier for working people and others to see the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment, which is banned by the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In Ohio in January Dennis McGuire died after a 26-minute ordeal involving a new and untested drug “cocktail.”

In April in Oklahoma, Clayton Lockett, given a lethal injection, writhed in pain for 43 minutes before he died. A report authorized by Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin stated Sept. 4 that his executioners had botched the insertion of the intravenous needle.

In Arizona in July Joseph Wood gasped for breath for nearly two hours after receiving the same two drugs that had been administered to McGuire.

Since 2009, when the main producer of lethal injection drugs ceased production in the face of growing worldwide opposition, officials in several states have been experimenting with new drug combinations, as well as discussing bringing back the electric chair, firing squads and the gas chamber.

Thirty-nine people were executed in 2013, including 16 in Texas, seven in Florida and six in Oklahoma. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have abolished the death penalty.

At the beginning of this year, 3,070 people (nearly a quarter of them in California alone) were on death row, compared to 517 in 1968. The figure jumped to 1,050 in 1982, and has been above 3,000 since 1996, the year the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which narrowed the grounds for prisoners to appeal convictions, was signed by President William Clinton.

Earl Ringo Jr. was executed by lethal injection in Missouri Sept. 10, the eighth execution in the state this year.

The 15th Annual March to Abolish the Death Penalty will be held in Houston Oct. 25.  
 
 
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