Henry Lee McCollum (born March 26, 1964) and Leon Brown (born November 24, 1967) are two African American men who were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death for a murder they did not commit.
McCollum and Brown were two intellectually disabled teenage brothers, 19 and 15 years old respectively, when a local of Robeson County, North Carolina, implicated them in the 1983 rape and murder of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie. In spite of no physical evidence connecting McCollum or Brown to the crime, interrogators coerced both teens into signing false confessions. At their trials, police and prosecutors suppressed evidence that may have resulted in their acquittals; both were convicted of murder and rape and sentenced to death. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia later cited McCollum's case as a prime justification for the existence of capital punishment.
McCollum and Brown challenged their convictions for decades. Both men earned a retrial in the 1990s, which resulted in McCollum again being convicted of murder and re-sentenced to death, while Brown was convicted only of rape and re-sentenced to life imprisonment. Following further challenges to their convictions, the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission became involved in their case. Between 2010 and 2014, DNA testing of crime scene evidence revealed that a completely separate man named Roscoe Artis was the actual perpetrator, while McCollum and Brown were innocent. They were both exonerated in 2014. Overall, McCollum and Brown spent almost 31 years in prison. Following their exonerations, McCollum and Brown were awarded $75 million USD, the largest award for a wrongful conviction in United States history.
Background McCollum and Brown were born in Jersey City, New Jersey, to Mamie Brown, who was a native of Robeson County and had moved to Jersey City with her mother. McCollum and Brown were raised by their grandmother and other relatives in Jersey City housing projects.
Both brothers were identified as having intellectual disabilities early in life. As a child, McCollum was placed in a school for the "educably mentally retarded." When he was 16, a psychologist at McCollum's school suggested moving McCollum to a group home. McCollum dropped out of high school with a second-grade reading level, while Brown could barely read or write by the time of the arrests in 1983. McCollum and Brown had both relocated to Red Springs, North Carolina, where their mother lived, by 1983.
Murder of Sabrina Buie On September 23, 1983, 11-year-old Sabrina Buie left her home in Red Springs. Early news reports stated that Buie left her home to visit an arcade; Buie's sister, who was 4 at the time of the murder, would later claim that the last time she saw Buie was when Buie told her she was going to return a bicycle belonging to Leon Brown. Her father Ronnie formally reported her missing after she did not return home by September 25. The following day, her body was found with some of her clothes removed. She had been raped and suffocated with her own underwear. The police chief of Red Springs, Luther W. Haggins, described Buie's murder as "one of the most brutal murder cases I've investigated."
The search for Buie lasted two days and involved 20 police officers. At the crime scene, police recovered several pieces of physical evidence, including a cigarette butt, beer cans, articles of Sabrina's bloodied clothing, bloodstained sticks, and a bloodstained board of plywood. Authorities recovered additional physical evidence in a nearby field, where police believed the actual murder occurred before Buie's body was moved to the location where it was found.
Confessions, arrests, and murder of Joann Brockman On September 28, police invited Henry McCollum to the Robeson County police station for questioning. McCollum claimed he saw Sabrina walking to a store on September 24 but denied any involvement in the crime.
The next day, a 17-year-old Robeson County high school student told police about rumors implicating McCollum in not only Buie's murder, but several alleged crimes in his native Jersey City, including the robbery of a pimp and an attempted rape the year prior. Four days later, and again in 2014, that high school student would admit to having fabricated the stories implicating McCollum merely because she thought McCollum "acted strange." However, in 1983, the stories convinced police to further question McCollum. McCollum then underwent an hours-long interrogation, during which the police told McCollum that a witness placed him at the crime scene. They also used racial slurs towards McCollum and assured him that if he signed a form waiving his Miranda rights and confessed, he could leave. McCollum did not have an attorney present during the interrogation. After being promised his freedom upon confessing, McCollum signed a false confession to the crime wherein he repeated the same incriminating accusations that police used to extract his confession from him. McCollum also claimed to have committed the gang rape and murder of Buie with four other teenage boys in the area, including then-15-year-old Leon Brown.
During McCollum's interrogation, Leon Brown arrived at the station with his mother and sister in tow. Brown's interrogation featured similar coercion; in a 2019 lawsuit, Brown accused Robeson County detective Joel Locklear of threatening Brown with death in North Carolina's gas chamber if he refused to sign away his Miranda rights. According to Brown, Detective Locklear then drafted a confession implicating Brown, McCollum, and the three other teenagers in the crime. The three others accused had airtight alibis or were otherwise proven to have not been connected to the crime, and one was out of state at the time of Buie's murder. As Brown was nearly illiterate, rather than leaving a signature on his confession, he wrote his name in block letters.
McCollum's interrogation ended at 2:30 am, after which McCollum started to walk out of the police station. When authorities asked where he was going, he said police told him he could leave when the interview was over, and he asked, "Can I go home now?" He was then arrested. After his exoneration, when discussing his interrogation, McCollum recounted, "I'd never been under such pressure, people yelling and screaming at me. I was scared and was just trying to get out of that police station and go home."
There were numerous inconsistencies between McCollum's confession and Brown's confession, which conflicted in details regarding who was involved in the crime, how McCollum and Brown met the victim, how they committed Buie's murder, and why the other boys implicated in their confessions were unable to be tied to the crime due to their alibis. Despite those inconsistencies, Brown was also arrested. Later on September 29, authorities charged McCollum and Brown with Buie's rape and murder. McCollum was held at the Robeson County jail without bond, while Brown was held at a juvenile facility in Fayetteville, in Cumberland County, North Carolina. No charges were ever filed against the other three teenagers implicated in McCollum and Brown's signed confessions.
McCollum and Brown's attorneys later stated that both McCollum's and Brown's confessions were coerced due to both teens' intellectual disabilities, as McCollum's IQ was measured as low as 51, and Brown's IQ was measured at 49. The American Psychiatric Association generally considers IQs measured below 70 to be indicative of intellectual disability. McCollum also had brain damage and an "extremely low" ability to comprehend language. During a later trial, neuropsychologists would testify that McCollum did not have the intellectual capacity to understand his Miranda rights or the language authorities used in writing the confession he signed.
Murder of Joann Brockman On October 22, 1983, while McCollum and Brown were in jail awaiting trial for Buie's murder, a missing persons report was filed for 18-year-old Joann Brockman. Later that same day, her body was found; she had been raped and strangled. Witnesses claimed to have seen Brockman with then 43-year-old Roscoe Artis, a serial rapist, suspected serial killer, and habitual sexual offender who lived near the Buie family and "within feet" of where Buie's body was found. Artis's history of sexual assaults on women dated back to 1957, and at the time of Buie and Brockman's murders, he was suspected in the 1980 rape and murder of 30-year-old Bernice Moss in Gaston County, North Carolina. Artis quickly confessed to Brockman's murder. Over the course of several interviews, Artis also suggested that McCollum and Brown were not responsible for Buie's murder.
In August 1984, Artis was sentenced to death for Brockman's murder, although his death sentence was later reduced to life imprisonment in 1989. Before the commutation of his death sentence in Brockman's case, Artis repeatedly told another North Carolina death row inmate that McCollum and Brown were innocent of Buie's murder.
Trials
First trial In October 1984, McCollum and Brown faced their first joint trial in Robeson County. Their prosecutor, Robeson and Scotland County District Attorney Joe Freeman Britt, prided himself on his exorbitantly high number of death penalty cases, to the point where Guinness World Records named him the "deadliest prosecutor in America" around 1988. Both shortly before and after McCollum and Brown's exonerations, Britt's enthusiastic prosecution of the brothers would come under scrutiny, given that, despite the fact that Britt had prosecuted Artis for Brockman's very similar murder earlier in the year, Britt had overlooked compelling evidence that implicated Artis in the murder of Buie.
The prosecution team's main pieces of evidence against McCollum and Brown were the signed confessions. Another witness for the prosecution, 17-year-old L.P. Sinclair, claimed to have heard McCollum and Brown talking about wanting to rape Buie prior to the crime and that McCollum confessed to the crime after the murder. Under cross-examination, however, Sinclair admitted that police had interviewed him three times before McCollum and Brown's arrests and that he never implicated either teenager in his interviews. Fingerprints lifted from the beer cans found at the scene of the crime did not match McCollum or Brown, and there was otherwise no physical or forensic evidence linking them to the murder. Nevertheless, both were convicted of first degree murder and rape on October 25, 1984, and sentenced to death. At 16, Brown's death sentence made him the youngest person on North Carolina's death row at the time.
Second trial In 1988, the North Carolina Supreme Court overturned both McCollum's and Brown's death sentences due to the trial judge neglecting to provide proper instructions to the jury relating to their duty to consider each defendant's guilt or innocence separately. The judge also determined that McCollum and Brown were entitled to separate trials.
In 1991, McCollum was again convicted of first degree murder and rape and sentenced to death. Brown's retrial occurred in 1992, but his jury convicted him only of Buie's rape and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Brown's conviction for rape was upheld in 1995, leaving him with exhausted appeals options.
Imprisonment