A federal jury in the United States has awarded $75 million to two brothers in North Carolina, decades after they were convicted of rape and murder they did not commit.
Leon Brown and Henry McCollum were arrested in 1983 and spent nearly 31 years in prison before the half-brothers were exonerated in 2014.
The award is significant because not all exonerees in the United States are guaranteed compensation. The federal government, Washington, DC, and only 35 states have some form of restitution laws, according to the Innocence Project, but advocates say many of them fall short in compensating people.
Like many exonerees around the country, Brown and McCollum opted to file a federal civil rights lawsuit against the government agencies involved in their wrongful convictions — a process that advocates say often takes years and it’s challenging to win.
Last week, a federal jury decided that Brown and McCollum should be compensated for their time in prison, nearly six years after filing a lawsuit in federal court. The jury awarded them $31 million each in compensatory damages — that’s $1 million for each year they were incarcerated. They will also receive an additional $13 million total in punitive damages, according to court documents.
Brown and McCollum were arrested and charged in 1983 with the rape and murder of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie in Red Springs, North Carolina, CNN previously reported. Both of them were sentenced to death, but Brown later had his sentence reduced to life in prison.
In 2014, both Brown and McCollum were exonerated and released from prison after DNA from a cigarette collected at the crime scene was tested and ultimately tied another person to the crime. The brothers filed a civil rights lawsuit in 2015 against local officials involved in the original case.
At the trial for their civil case, attorneys for the brothers had to prove that they had been wrongfully convicted, and argued they had been coerced to give false confessions.
Attorney Elliot Abrams said his team presented evidence showing that investigators withheld information in Brown and McCollum’s initial trial, including the manner in which the interrogations were conducted and the existence of another suspect.
“There was a heinous rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl and the government said these two people did it and confessed to it. There was nothing to counter that,” Abrams said. “We now know they covered it up intentionally.”
Leon Brown speaks with a reporter at the Maury Correctional Institution in Maury, North Carolina, in 2014.
At the time, McCollum was 19 and had a low IQ, which Abrams compares to that of a 9-year-old boy; and there were inconsistencies when comparing statements made to police with details of the crime scene as well as the autopsy, the attorneys argued in the lawsuit.
CNN has reached out to Scott MacLatchie, an attorney for the two North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation officers involved in the case and to the Robeson County Sheriff’s Department for comment.
Unlike many exoneration cases, attorneys representing McCollum and Brown were successful in their attempts to prove misconduct, said Rebecca Brown, the director of policy for the Innocence Project.
“Sometimes somebody was just misidentified and it wasn’t necessarily because there was an intentional suggestive lineup, it’s just error in the system that will exist anyway,” Brown said. “That does not mean by the way that there wasn’t misconduct, it just means that it’s very difficult to prove misconduct that rises to the level of a civil rights violation.”
