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| Henry Lee McCollum (left) and Leon Brown. |
Thirty years after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in rural North Carolina, based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, two mentally disabled half-brothers were declared innocent and released Tuesday by a Robeson County court.
The case against the men, always weak, fell apart after DNA evidence implicated another man with a history of rape and murder.
The startling shift in fortunes for the men, Henry Lee McCollum, now 50, who has spent three decades on death row, and Leon Brown, 46, who was serving a life sentence, provided one of the most dramatic examples yet of the potential for false, coerced confessions and also of the power of DNA tests to exonerate the innocent.
As friends and relatives of the two men wept, a superior court judge, Douglas B. Sasser, said he was vacating their convictions and ordering their release.
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