Two half-brothers today walked free from death row – thirty years after they were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl.
Henry McCollum and Leon Brown were cleared by DNA evidence yesterday, three decades after they were found guilty of the raping Sabrina Buie and suffocating her with her own underwear near Greenville, North Carolina in 1984.
Their alleged crime was even held up by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as an example of why he supported the death penalty.
But on Tuesday McCollum and Brown’s convictions were overturned after another man’s DNA was found on a cigarette butt that was left near the crime scene.
Superior Court Judge Douglas Sasser said the new DNA results contradicted the case prosecutors put forward at the men’s trials.
Defense attorneys have also argued that testimony used against the brothers were coerced confessions from two scared teenagers with low IQs. McCollum was 19 at the time and Brown was 15.
The local police force is also accused of concealing boxes of evidence connected to the killing for decades.

Henry McCollum, Brown’s half-brother, was 19 at the time Sabrina Buie was found raped and murdered in 1983
McCollum, 50, hugged his weeping parents at the gates of Central Prison in Raleigh today. 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.”
Through his attorney, Brown declined to be interviewed following his release.

Prison: In a June 10, 1987 photo, Leon Brown sits in the day room of his Death Row cell block in Raleigh, NC’s Central Prison. On Tuesday, lawyers said DNA analysis of a cigarette butt found at the crime scene link it to a man serving a life sentence for a similar rape and killing.