STORY: "A horrifying miscarriage of justice in North Carolina: How many times was Justice Antonin Scalia wrong about Henry Lee McCollum and the death penalty?" by Dahlia Lithwick, published by Slate on September 4, 2014. (Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts and the law for Slate.)
GIST: "The convictions of two mentally disabled half-brothers were vacated and the two men were ordered released by Superior Court Judge Douglas Sasser in North Carolina on Tuesday. They were freed from prison Wednesday. Henry Lee McCollum, 50, had been on death row for 30 years, longer than anyone in North Carolina history. He and Leon Brown, 46, who was serving a life sentence, were convicted for the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. DNA evidence implicated another man, a known sex offender the police had not investigated, despite the fact that he lived next to the crime scene. McCollum and Brown were 19 and 15 at the time local police were investigating the murder of Sabrina Buie. Both confessed to the crime after lengthy police interrogations. They recanted shortly after—in fact McCollum has recanted 226 times—but were convicted, largely on the basis of the false confessions, even though no physical evidence connected them to the crime scene. Police also hid exculpatory evidence for years. A cigarette found at the crime scene now implicates a man who lived a block away from the soybean field where the girl’s body was found. He is currently serving a life sentence for a rape and murder that happened less than a month after Buie’s rape and murder..........It wasn’t until 2010, when the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission came into the case, that the evidence was re-examined seriously. In July, the DNA on the cigarette butt found at the crime scene was revealed to match the DNA of the known sex offender. This led to Tuesday’s extraordinary release order.........This case highlights the same well-known and extensively documented problems that can lead to false arrests and convictions: Police who are incentivized to find any suspect quickly, rather than the right one carefully; false confessions elicited after improper questioning; exculpatory evidence never turned over; the prosecution of vulnerable, mentally ill, or very young suspects in ways that take advantage of their innocence rather than protecting it; prosecutorial zeal that has far more to do with the pursuit of victories than the pursuit of truth; and a death penalty appeals system that treats this entire screwed-up process of investigation and conviction as both conclusive and unreviewable..........Of those 40 exonerees who confessed, for instance, 14 were mentally disabled or borderline mentally disabled, and three more (at least) were mentally ill. Thirteen of the 40 were juveniles. All but four were interrogated for more than three hours at a sitting. Seven described their involvement in the crime as coming to them in a “dream” or “vision.” Seven were told they had failed polygraph tests. ... Despite all these hints that their confessions were lengthy and coercive, and despite the fact that they were mostly vulnerable individuals, none had any luck challenging their confessions before trial. The confessions were thought to be such powerful evidence of guilt that eight were convicted despite DNA tests at trial that in fact excluded them as the culprit.........The lack of any physical evidence linking the young men to the crime scene was no bar to their convictions. Fingerprints taken from a beer can at the scene did not match theirs. A local teen told the police she thought McCollum was involved, “because McCollum didn’t act right, riding a bicycle around staring at people, mostly women.” The two other suspects McCollum named were never charged with anything because there was no evidence. Lawyers for McCollum and Brown contend that local police hid boxes of crucial exculpatory evidence from the time of the trial in 1984. They were never turned over to defense lawyers or prosecutors..........As the New York Times notes, as recently as 2010, the North Carolina Republican Party featured McCollum’s booking photo on campaign fliers accusing a local Democrat of being soft on crime. The Times also points out that the defendants were prosecuted by Joe Freeman Britt “the 6-foot-6, Bible-quoting district attorney who was profiled by 60 Minutes as the country’s ‘deadliest D.A.’ ” for seeking and getting the death penalty so often. (Britt told the Raleigh News & Observer last week that he still believed the men were guilty.).........One of the most infuriating things is that North Carolina at several points could have tested evidence known about years ago. We now know that three days before McCollum and Brown went to trial in 1984, local police asked the State Bureau of Investigation to examine a fingerprint on a beer can from the crime scene to see if it matched the man now implicated in the murder. The state didn’t bother. In 2006, Brown’s lawyers filed a motion to test the DNA on the cigarette butt. The results excluded both McCollum and Brown. But it wasn’t until several years later, when the state’s innocence commission got involved, that analysts found DNA on the cigarette butt matched up with the man convicted in the same neighborhood of a similar crime. Sharon Stellato of the commission testified on Tuesday that the man told her several times during interviews that McCollum and Brown were innocent."
The entire story can be found at:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/09/henry_lee_mccollum_cleared_by_dna_evidence_in_north_carolina_after_spending.html
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
Dear Reader. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog. We are following this case.
I have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses several thousand posts. The search box is located near the bottom of the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and myself get more out of the site.
The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-charles-smith-award-presented-to_28.html
I look forward to hearing from readers at:
hlevy15@gmail.com.
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog;
