Two intellectually disabled half brothers who spent more than three decades in prison after they were wrongfully convicted in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl have been awarded $75 million by a jury in a federal civil rights case in North Carolina, reports the New York Times.
Henry McCollum, 57, and Leon Brown, 53, spent 30 years 11 months and seven days in prison before they were freed in 2014. The case against them fell apart after DNA evidence implicated a man who lived a block from where the girl’s body was found and who had admitted to committing a similar crime around the same time.
Elliot Abrams, a lawyer for the brothers, said in an interview that they went through “hell” in prison while the two state investigators who he said had coerced the brothers into confessing to the crime “spent 30 years covering it up.”
McCollum and Brown were teenagers when they were found guilty based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, and then spent “the best years of their lives” in prison, said Desmond Hogan, a lawyer for the brothers.
On Friday, a jury in Raleigh, N.C., awarded each of them $31 million in compensatory damages — $1 million for each year they spent wrongfully imprisoned. They were also awarded a total of $13 million in punitive damages.
The jury determined that two former state investigators, Leroy Allen and Kenneth Snead, had violated McCollum’s constitutional rights by coercing him into confessing to the crime. Snead, the jury found, violated Brown’s constitutional rights by coercing a confession from him.
