#162 Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions - Henry McCollum and Leon Brown

to death row. Twenty years ago, the Center on Wrongful Convictions, which Laura and I co direct, was deeply involved in exonerating men off of death row in Illinois. The numbers kept kicking up. It went up to twenty people who had been wrongfully sentenced to death, twenty innocent people. Eventually, Illinois lost confidence of the people on death row were actually guilty, and so we got rid of the death penalty.

When the death penalty was abolished in Illinois ten years ago, there were some prosecutors who claimed that the sky would fall, that crime rates would rise, that the system would miss the ability and the power to use the death penalty to right wrongs, and that hasn't happened. We've moved on, we've evolved, and it's time for the rest of the

country to follow suit. Here's the thing. The death penalty is supposed to be reserved for the worst of the worst, but way too often those are the cases where wrongful convictions happen. These are the crimes where there's so much pressure on law enforcement to come up with quick answers that there are rushes to judgment. Right. That's the problem with the death penalty. People can get so blinded with the horrific nous of a crime that moral outrage can

distort the search for the truth. And that's what happened in this case. Henry McCollum and his brother Leon Brown paid a terrible price for the police's rush to judgment. The facts of the crime often don't tell the whole story, and sometimes tell a false story. So while on paper this case looks like one that is deserving of the ultimate punishment, in practice, it's sent two innocent men to prison for more than thirty years. Today's story starts in

Robinson County, North Carolina. It's a rural area on the state southern border. Eighty miles inland from the Atlantic coast. Since the eighteenth century, Robinson County has been known for social strata and rachel strife. It's a place where a small group of elite white men descended from colonial landowners, dominate everything from the lumber business to the illegal drug trade to the courtrooms. Meanwhile Native Americans, poor whites, and

black people get the scraps. On September, Ronnie Lee Bowie came home to his tiny house in one of Robinson County's predominantly black communities. It was a little after twelve am. He just finished working the midnight shift. Within minutes, he noticed that his eleven year old daughter, Sabrina, was missing from her room. Sabrina's family calls the police. As the sun rises and words spreads, Friends and neighbors fan out to search for her, but there's no sign of Sabrina

until the next afternoon September. That's when Sabrina buy is found, and it's one of the worst discoveries imaginable. Sabrina is lying in a soybean field, dead, surrounded by empty beer cans and cigarette butts. She's been beaten and raped. She isn't wearing anything except for a bra that's been pushed up around her neck, and her cause of death. Sabrina had been suffocated by her own underwear. Someone had pushed them into her throat with a stick. You know, when

I read about this crime, it just gutted me. My reaction was visceral. There's a level of depravity here that shocks the conscience. Police couldn't bring themselves to believe that someone from their own community would have done this, so they started investigating outsiders. Pretty soon, police caught wind of a rumor about a nineteen year old who just arrived in Robinson County to visit his mom. The local high schoolers thought this new kid might have killed Sabrina because,

according to them, he looked weird. That new kid's name was Henry McCollum. Even though his mom lived in Robinson County, Henry had grown up in New Jersey with his grandma. Henry had been diagnosed with intellectual disability when he was really young. For years, he attended a special school, but he failed a bunch of grades anyway and eventually dropped out. School wasn't Henry's strong suit, but obedience to authority was.

He'd never been associated with any kind of crime with nothing more to go on than a high school rumor. Police go to Henry's mom's house, and on the evening of September they bring Henry in for interrogation. Three police officers questioned him for more than four hours, all off camera. So we don't know everything that happened in that room. What we do know is that some of Henry's interrogators were familiar with the crime scene. They knew all the

information that a killer would be expected to describe. Sometime around two i am, the interrogators emerged from the room with a confession that named Henry as one of Sabrina's assailants. It had been written out by the cops. Henry had signed it at the end in oversized letters that looked like a child's handwriting. According to Henry, as soon as he wrote his name on the last page, he looked up at his interrogators and said, can I go home now? I think Henry is a very kind person. He's a

very thoughtful person. That's Representative Yanetta Aliston. She's a member of the North Carolina State Legislature, but before that she was a death penalty lawyer who worked on Henry's case. From the first time I met Henry in it's my impression that his deficits were very obvious. I think anyone talking to him now, or five years ago or thirty years ago would have noticed, and so as a result

of his deficits, he signed the statement. Now, I think most folks in that circumstance would understand that if they signed a confession to murder, that they wouldn't be allowed to walk out the front door of a police station. But the statement used the language that Henry was very unlikely to have understood, and so he didn't know what

was happening at all. While Henry's confession was light on details, it's story tracked exactly what an investigator who had been at the scene would know, everything from the pattern on Sabrina's shirt to the brand of cigarettes left behind. Here's the thing, Henry could not lead the police to any evidence that they didn't already know about. His confession only contained details that the police already knew. That's a red flag.

You have to wonder is this the suspect's confession or a confession that was scripted by law enforcement to ensure that this suspect was going to get convicted. Henry's confession didn't just implicate him. The story was that he'd attacked Sabrina along with four other teenagers. Now, three of those teams turned out to have strong alibis. One of them had even been out of state at the time of

Sabrina's death. Prosecutors never filed charges against those three, But the fourth person named it was Leon Brown, Henry McCollums fifteen year old brother. And while Henry was disabled, Leon's limitations were far more profound. His i Q was in the forties, on the border line between moderately and severely disabled, and he was completely illiterate. Both of these men, who were at that time boys, their intellectual disabilities were exploited.

Folks who have cognitive deficits that make it difficult or complicated for them to make everyday decisions to get dressed, to loan a schedule, to make food for themselves, to drive cars, to learn in school at a level that's consistent with their age. Folks who are unable to do those things. We shouldn't be holding them to the same standard in our criminal justice system, and certainly not in our death penalty system. When Henry implicated Leon in his confession.

It turned out the timing was pretty bad. While Henry was being questioned, the boy's mom arrived at the police station begging to see Henry. Police told her she'd have to wait until he confessed. But here's the thing. Henry's mom brought Leon with her to the station. He was almost surely too disabled to be left home alone. So after Henry confessed and the police came looking for Leon, they didn't have to go any farther than their own lobby.

Police put Leon into an interrogation room, then merched his big brethren to show him what to do. Within minutes, Leon was signing a written out confession of his own, scratching his name as best he could on the bottom of a statement he couldn't even read. Based on their confessions, the two brothers were arrested and charged with rape and capital murder. This episode is sponsored by a i G, a leading global insurance company, and Paul Weiss, Rifkin, Warton

and Garrison, a leading international law firm. The A i G Pro Bono program provides free legal services and other support to many nonprofit organizations and individuals most in need, and recently they announced that working to reform the criminal justice system will become a key pillar of the program's mission.

Paul Weiss has law had an unwavering commitment to providing impactful, pro bono legal assistance to the most vulnerable members of our society and in support of the public interest, including extensive or in the criminal justice area. The question of who killed Sabrina Booie gripped Robinson County. The crime was terrible and the community wanted justice, so the county's top

prosecutor took over the case. The district attorney himself, Joe Freeman Britt, was six ft six a seasoned trial lawyer known for a dramatic courtroom flourishes like pounding bibles in front of the jury. But he was more than just a flashy attorney. By the time Henry and Leon's cases crossed his desk, Joe Freeman Britt had become infamous nationwide for his success at obtaining the death penalty. Over his career,

Britt sent more than forty seven people to death. At one point, he obtained two dozen death sentences in only twenty eight months. Britt was so prolific that he even ended up in the Guinness Book of World records, which called him the deadliest prosecutor. Some prosecutors believe deeply in the eye for an eye mentality. For some, it's almost a biblical calling, like religious fervor that animates them. Forty

seven people. I mean, if he weren't a prosecutor, he'd be one of the most prolific serial killers in the United States people. That's unthinkable. It seems like Britt leaned into his hardass reputation. He'd run training conferences for other prosecutors where he taught them to quote rip that jugular out when he felt like waxing poetic. Britt would say, within each of us burns a flame that constantly whispers, preserve life at any cost. It's the prosecutor's job, he

would add to extinguish that flame. I think that that sums up he was as a person and as a district attorney. Joe Freeman, Britt was frankly a terror. He was a large, commanding presence, and I think really leaned into that persona. I know that he was very from what I've read, he was very much into the theater of a courtroom and really played into that to secure convictions. Joe Freeman Britt was in full form, gearing up to try Henry and Leon for Sabrina's murder and seeking the

death penalty for them both. But before trial, two major problems emerged with Britt's case against the brothers. First of all, Henry and Leon's confessions didn't match each other on several important details, who was involved, how they met up with Sabrina, and the details of the rape and murder. And of course there was the matter of the three other boys named in Henry's confession, all of whom were definitely innocent. Leon or Henry. There was nothing other than their words

that linked them to this crime, you know. And Henry and Leon were not the kinds of people that would have committed a perfect crime. Even the way in which the confessions were written didn't ring true. In his statement used language that Henry, you know, it was very unlikely to have understood. And I think that's a product of his age and most certainly a product of his intellectual disabilities.

And Leon's is similar. If you look at Leon's statement, it's written in penmanship that Leon was incapable of because of his deficits, And again use language and detail and just sentence structure, that Leon would have been incapable of creating the second problem. There was a pretty obvious alternative suspect, a man named Roscoe Artists. Artists lived near the field where Sabrina's body was found, and he had a disturbing history.

Only a few weeks after Henry and Leon were arrested, Roscoe Artists had murdered an eighteen year old girl in an attack eaerily similar to the attack on Sabrina. Both victims were raped and asphyxiated. Both of them were also found in fields wearing nothing but bras pushed up around their necks. It gets worse. Roscoe Artist was also a suspect in another rape murder case from In that case, the victim was found with an object shoved in her throat,

another similarity that should have been impossible to miss. Henry McCullum and Leon Brown did not have the kind of background that suggested they were capable of the horrific nature of this crime. This was the work of a sexual predator, probably a single sexual predator. Because of the way the crime scene presented itself. This is not some huge community that is beset by violent crime, and the first thing

that police officers should have done. Is focused on men in their own community who had a proclivity for committing these kinds of crimes. W Scool Artists showed a history of doing this over and over again, and his home was very close to where the body was found. Now here's the really crazy thing about Roscoe Artists. One month before Henry and Leon went to trial, Artists was tried and convicted for the attack on the eighteen year old girl.

He was sentenced to death. And that fact almost gives away the punchline, because sure enough, Roscoe Artists was prosecuted by Joe Freeman Britt himself for a crime nearly identical to the one Britt was prosecuting Henry and Leon. For the similarities between Artists other murders and Sabrina's death should have been unmistakable. Those are warning signs, stop lights to say, hey, wait a minute, let's see what really happened here, Let's look at people who more fit the profile. Well, Roscoe

Artists was no stranger to law enforcement. That's what's so mind boggling about this case. It was all they're ready to be done right, and it has done so wrong, so wrong, This horrible, tragic nightmare could have been averted from the very get go, and the woman who Rascoe Artists killed less than a month after Sabrina Booie was killed, her life might have been saved. Not everyone overlooked the

similarities between these murders. We know this because of what happened with a piece of forensic evidence in the case, a single unidentified fingerprint found on one of the beer cans near Sabrina's body. Three days before Henry and Leon's trial started. The police sent a request to the state crime Lab to compare that beer can fingerprint to the

fingerprints of Roscoe Artists. But Joe Freeman Britt, even before the crime lab had time to do the testing, Britt charged ahead with Henry and Leon's trial, and that trial was hardly a fair fight. You've got the deadliest d a facing off against two disabled teenagers never stood a chance. It's it's going to be their word against the word of the police when this case goes to trial. How's somebody with a fifty six i Q or i Q supposed to try to match their wits with prosecutor like

Joe Freeman Britt. The heartbreaker was when Henry McCollum took the stand in his own defense with his typical flare. Joe Freeman Britt handled that cross examination himself. Didn't that touch your soul at all? Britt asked, when that little girl was down on the ground hollering, it didn't touch my soul. Henry answered, because I didn't kill nobody. He added, I want to tell you something, Joe Freeman, God got your judgment right in hell waiting for you. It wasn't enough.

The jury convicted both Henry and Leon based on the confessions. After the verdicts came back that fingerprint testing appears to have been canceled. Jefrem Brett was much more concerned and laser focus on pursuing the death penalty against Henry McCollum and Leon Brown that he was in finding the real killer. They failed to pursue a fingerprint examination that I tend to think would have been very much determinative in this case, and I have to imagine that Joe Freeman Britt was

part of that decision making process. The defense was never even told that police had requested fingerprint testing. Instead, that information remained hidden, and Henry and Leon were sent to North Carolina's death row. Right alongside Roscoe artists. A few years later, in a court overturned Henry and Leon's convictions,

but Britt retried them both separately. At Leon's second trial, the judge dismissed the murder charges against him, so Leon was convicted only of rape and sentenced to life in prison, not death. But Henry still faced murder charges and he was soon convicted again. His attorneys hoped that at least they might be able to save his life this time, but they were wrong. When Henrys sentence was read, he sat silently with his head down on the table like a scared child. He had to go back to death row.

The case of Sabrina Booie's murder was closed, but not forgotten. That disabled kid who became a murder suspect because some high school or thought he looked weird was soon being singled out by a justice on the United States Supreme Court. But Henry McCollum's case was getting attention for all the wrong reasons. It was, and the Supreme Court was debating whether the United States should still have the death penalty. In a case from Texas, one Justice Harry Blackman wrote

that the death penalty should be ruled unconstitutional. Justice Blackman described how lethal injection works, how one human being injects draw into another human's body in front of an audience, until the condemned person dies in front of them. The Justice wrote about his experience of trying for twenty years to develop rules that would ensure a perfect death penalty process.

After nearly two decades, he declared the task impossible. No set of rules would be able to guarantee that we only execute the guilty, and only after the guilty receive a fair process. From this day forward, Justice Blackman wrote, I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death. Justice Anton and Scalia wrote a scathing rebuttal, and this is where Henry and his brother Leon come in. Lethal injection. Justice Scalia wrote, looks pretty desirable compared to some of

the worst murder cases. He urged readers to consider the case of the eleven year old girl killed by stuffing her panties down our throat. How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that. Justice Leah was talking about the case of Sabrina Buoy. Justice Scalia said, if there's every case that warranted the death penalty, it's this one.

Knowing what we know now about Henry Leon's innocence, I think it completely undermines in a legal or moral argument behind that statement, because if this case could be held up as the poster case for the death penalty, and now we've discovered what an absolute mess of negligence and railroading it involved, then that means the entire system is undermined. The years ticked by and that railroading started coming to light as the record of Joe Freeman Britt started getting

some scrutiny. According to a report by Harvard Law School's Fair Punishment Project, Britt committed misconduct in fourteen cases. In Henry McCollum's case, the report said he failed to notify the defense not only about the beer can fingerprints, but also about a cigarette butt found near Sabrina's body. In two thousand five, more than twenty years after Sabrina died, Henry's post conviction lawyers asked for DNA testing on the

traces of saliva left on the cigarette butt. That testing found a single male profile, and it didn't belong to Henry or Leon. That evidence should have been enough to exonerate them right then and there. The testing wasn't sophisticated enough at that point to match it to someone else. Basically, we knew that it wasn't Henry's. We knew that it

wasn't Leon's, but that's all that we knew. The profile couldn't be run through the national DNA database, and so Henry and Leon were denied exoneration because their lawyers couldn't tell the state whose DNA it really was. It took nearly nine years for the case to regain momentum. With the help of another inmate, Leon wrote to the North Carolina innocenc in Quirky Commission and asked them to look

into his case. The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission is an independent state agency charged with investigating claims of actual innocence. But the Commission doesn't have an agenda. It's not here to prove that the defendants did not commit this crime. It's here to find the truth, and it's the only

statewide agency like it in the country. They commission could say, we want to test this evidence, we want access to these records, we want access to these boxes of evidence that has been sitting on your shelf for thirty years. Hand them over to us. Right now, so as an extraordinary power to have. There was no stone left unturned. They tested every hair, They tested rappers found at the

crime scene. They tested beer cans. They tested all of her clothing, her blouse, her shoes, her socks, her underpants. They tested cigarette butts. This time, with more sophisticated testing, the cigarette butt DNA was able to be identified. It wasn't Henry's, it wasn't Leon's. When they ran it through the North Carolina database, they got a hit. They got

a hit to Roscoe artists. We knew of Roscoe artists, we knew how eerily similar their crimes were Roscoe artists who was living in the very same community, and a month later committed a very similar crime. That was enough.

Henry and Leon's lawyers, including Representative Alston, asked the court to throw out their convictions based on DNA evidence of the real killer, and on September two, two thousand fourteen, Henry McCollum and Leon Brown were exonerated in a Robinson County courtroom as the burden of wrongful conviction was lifted from him. Leon Brown smiled big, but all Henry McCollum could do was sit back in his chair, take a deep breath, and close his eyes. Both men had served

nearly thirty one years in prison. Now fine, they were going home. No, what's my name's right? That's rights to make a doubly official. Both Henry and Leon received pardons from the North Carolina Governor in June two thousand fifteen. Joe Freeman Britt remained a firm believer in their guilt. When he heard about the pardons, Britt called the governor a damn fool. Today, Rosco Artiss remains behind bars in North Carolina. On appeal, his death sentence was converted to

life in prison. For his part. Joe Freeman Britt died in two thousand sixteen. So here's the thing. During the thirty one years that Henry spent on death row, he went through two capital trials. Twenty four jurors evaluated the evidence against him, and they all voted to convict. Over the years, more than twenty judges reviewed the case against him and said they found nothing wrong. Twelve defense attorneys represented him over the years. They all did their jobs

just as the system expects them to. If it weren't for the Innocence Inquiry Commission, Henry would probably be dead today, executed by lethal injection. But North Carolina is the only state with a commission like that, even though twenty seven other states have the death penalty, and the commission can only take a tiny fraction of the cases that are brought to it. So I have to agree with Supreme Court Justice Blackman. We can have the best process in the world, but there is no such thing as a

perfect death penalty. They're going to be errors in the fact that in some parts of a state the death penalty is sought more frequently than in other parts of the state. They're going to be errors in the kinds of cases, whether they're high publicity cases or not, or in the race of the victim. They're going to be disparities in the way these decisions are made. It's a human endeavor, so there are going to be errors. Henry

McCollums not alone. To date, one hundred and seventy two people have been exonerated off death rows nationwide, including at least nine in North Carolina. Have we saved every innocent person sentenced to death? There's no way we haven't executed an innocent person, and it'll happen again until we abolish the death penalty for good. You know, someone hadn't written a letter on Leon's behalf to the Innasis and Career Commission, we would not be here having this conversation. Henry and

Leon would not have been released. And our criminal justice system, and our death penalty system in particular shouldn't and can't, rely on luck to protect innocent people. Thanks to luck, perseverance, and good lawyering, Henry and Leon are survived Earth. Instead of living on death row, they can finally just live. I try to stay busy every day. That's Henry, my future wife. You know, she makes my days. She sweets when I get up in the morning, like Robert Clark

in the morning. You know. I make her coffee, which she drinks the cafe. I drink mine's black with no shig. But it's a lot of food that I enjoy eating. I like turn up greens, call up greens, and I said, my lady is the best one knew how to fix that baked chicken. For me. It feels good to breathe this air out here. It's good to have my freedom again. And here's Leon. My favorite thing to do is really all listen to the radio, Old easy R and b

classes and seventies and eighties and nineties. Some of those who storms stones that they don't make momot here the group. You know. I try to treat everybody the way I would want to be treated. I guess that's why they lightening the way they do. They keep me going, keep me laughing, and you know, might be here for you know it the way the day be going. Man, it's always something to do. This episode is dedicated to Henry and Leon and to all the brave lawyers fighting to

abolish the death penalty. Steve and I salute you. That's the story of Henry McCollum and Leon Brown. Join us next week when we tell you about Tyra Patterson. Tyra was just nineteen when she falsely confessed to stealing a necklace, but because of an arcane legal rule, that confession to stealing was to into a conviction for murder. Wrongful conviction. False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one Special thanks to

our executive producers Jason Slam and Kevin Wardis. Our production team is headed by Senior producer and Pope, along with producers Josh Hammer, and Jess Shane. Our show is mixed by Genie Montalvo. John Colbert is our intrepid intern. Our music was composed by j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura and II Writer, and you can follow me on Twitter at s driven. For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com.

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