Half-brothers exonerated after 30 years in US prison

New DNA evidence leads to release of pair who were arrested as teenagers

Two mentally disabled half-brothers were freed on Tuesday after serving three decades in a United States prison for the rape and murder of a child that they did not commit.

After new DNA evidence came to light, a judge in Robeson County said that Henry Lee McCollum, 50, North Carolina state's longest-serving death-row inmate, and Leon Brown, 46, were innocent of the 1983 rape and killing of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie.

The ruling comes after an investigation by the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission that found no DNA evidence at the crime scene that could be traced back to McCollum or Brown, according to a report posted on time.com on Tuesday.

But a cigarette found and tested in 2010 contained the DNA of another man, Roscoe Artis, who lived a block away from where the crime took place and is serving a life sentence for another murder and rape within weeks of Buie's death, the report said.

It said both McCollum and Brown appealed their convictions over the years. In 2006, Brown filed a motion to test the DNA of a cigarette butt found at the crime scene. The results eventually excluded both McCollum and Brown. Several years later, the state's innocence commission got involved and in July announced that DNA on the cigarette butt actually belonged to Artis.

Both McCollum and Brown-were teenagers at the time of their arrests in 1983.

Following false confessions, McCollum was given a death sentence and Brownwas serving life for the rape.

"This case highlights in a most dramatic manner the importance of finding the truth," said Ann Kirby, attorney for Brown.

"Today, truth has prevailed, but it comes 30 years too late for Sabrina Buie and her family, and for Leon, Henry and their families.

"Their sadness, grief and loss will remain with them forever." North Carolina state law now requires homicide interrogations to be recorded or videotaped, but at the time the brothers were convicted, such laws were not in effect.

There were no recordings of the confessions, which contained details that authorities now acknowledge were factually impossible.

More than 300 US prisoners have been exonerated through DNA since the first tests took place in 1989, according to The Innocence Project, a nonprofit litigation and public policy organization. Eighteen of those people had served time on death row, and nearly two-thirds of the overall group was African-American, the International Business Time said in a report posted on its website on Wednesday.

(China Daily 09/04/2014 page10)