Guilty Till Proven Innocent
Did you know there are more innocent people in our jails and prisons today than ever before. The rate of exonerations continues to rise, revealing an unreliable system of criminal justice. A lack of accountability for police and prosecutors, reliance on junk science and mistaken eyewitnesses, and the indigent defense crisis are major contributors to wrongful convictions that have undermined the credibility of our system and ruined the lives of innocent men and women.
One of those ruined innocent lives is that of Henry McCollum and his brother Leon Brown.
The “Crime”
Henry lived in New Jersey but had come to rural North Carolina to spend time with his mother and his brother, Leon. It was the autumn of 1983. Henry was 19, and Leon was just 15. Henry had been in Robeson County for a few weeks when the body of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie was discovered in a soybean field just a short distance away from his mother’s home. The little girl had been raped, and suffocated. Police in the tiny town of Red Springs began interviewing local residents, searching for suspects.
One police officer came across a high school student who repeated a rumor she’d heard at school: Henry McCollum, a teen from out of town, seemed suspicious and might have been involved in the crime. Henry had intellectual disabilities, which may have been why other teens felt he behaved strangely. When officers showed up at his mother’s house, Henry went to the police station voluntarily.
It was evening, and a group of law enforcement officers kept him in an interrogation room until late in the night, demanding that Henry tell them about the crime, promising him that if he gave them the facts about the crime, he would be allowed to go home. After four and a half hours of questioning, Henry broke. He told the officers a story filled with details they’d given him, about a rape and murder he had nothing to do with. The officers wrote up a grisly confession and Henry, who could barely comprehend the written document, signed it. And then he asked, “Can I go home now?” He had no idea that he wouldn’t go home again for more than three decades.
As Henry invented the details of the rape, he added other characters to the scene to share responsibility for the awful crime. He said that his brother Leon had been with him, along with two friends. By coincidence, Leon and his mother were already at the police station; they’d come to wait for Henry. Police pulled Leon into another interrogation room, and extracted a confession from him too. Leon, who was more profoundly disabled than Henry, could not even read the document he signed just a half hour after Henry’s confession. It conflicted in significant ways with Henry’s account, and both confessions pointed to two other boys who police later determined could not possibly have been present. Both Henry and Leon quickly retracted their confessions — in fact Henry has recanted 226 times, but it was too late.
Those two confessions — coerced, conflicting, and patently false — became the evidence that prosecutors would use to send two innocent, poor, black, disabled teenagers to death row.
The lack of any physical evidence linking the young men to the crime scene was no bar to their convictions. Fingerprints taken from a beer can at the scene did not match theirs. A local teen told the police she thought McCollum was involved, “because McCollum didn’t act right, riding a bicycle around staring at people, mostly women.” The two other suspects McCollum named were never charged with anything because there was no evidence. Lawyers for McCollum and Brown contend that local police hid boxes of crucial exculpatory evidence from the time of the trial in 1984. They were never turned over to defense lawyers or prosecutors.
In 1984, a jury sentenced both of them to death. In 1991, they won a new trial, and Leon was re-sentenced to life in prison. However, Henry was again sentenced to death. His confession was, once again, the key piece of evidence.
Search For Justice
During his years on death row, Henry’s case became notorious. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia pointed to the brutality of Henry’s crime as a reason to support capital punishment. During North Carolina legislative elections in 2010, Henry’s face showed up on political flyers as an example of a brutal rapist and child killer who deserved to be executed. Henry continued to proclaim his innocence to anyone who would listen.
One of the most infuriating things is that North Carolina at several points could have tested evidence known about years ago. We now know that three days before Henry and Leon went to trial in 1984, local police asked the State Bureau of Investigation to examine a fingerprint on a beer can from the crime scene to see if it matched the man now implicated in the murder. The state didn’t bother.
In 2006, Leon’s lawyers filed a motion to test the DNA on the cigarette butt. The results excluded both Henry and Leon. But it wasn’t until several years later, when the state’s innocence commission got involved, that analysts found DNA on the cigarette butt matched up with the man convicted in the same neighborhood of a similar crime. Sharon Stellato of the commission testified that the man told her several times during interviews that Henry and Leon were innocent.
Based on the Commission’s overwhelming evidence of innocence, the brothers were released from prison in 2014. In 2015, then-Gov. Pat McCrory granted the brothers a full pardon of innocence. Also that year, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer cited their case as a reason to outlaw the death penalty.
This case highlights the same well-known and extensively documented problems that can lead to false arrests and convictions: Police who are incentivized to find any suspect quickly, rather than the right one carefully; false confessions elicited after improper questioning; exculpatory evidence never turned over; the prosecution of vulnerable, mentally ill, or very young suspects in ways that take advantage of their innocence rather than protecting it; prosecutorial zeal that has far more to do with the pursuit of victories than the pursuit of truth; and a death penalty appeals system that treats this entire screwed-up process of investigation and conviction as both conclusive and un-reviewable.
And while this case focuses on Henry and Leon being mentally ill it’s important to note that both men were black.
According to the Equal Justice Initiative “African Americans are burdened by a presumption of guilt that most defense lawyers are not prepared to overcome. As a result, African Americans make up 47% of exonerations even though they are only 13% of the population. Innocent Black people are about seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white people, and Black people who are convicted of murder are about 50% more likely to be innocent than non-Black people convicted of murder.”
And while many articles focus on Henry and Leon’s mental illness we cannot ignore the race aspect.
But what happened to Henry and Leon after their release proved even more problematic and for me even more upsetting.
The Aftermath
As exonerees, they emerged with big dollar signs on their backs. In 2015, the state of North Carolina paid $750,000 to Henry to compensate for the 30 years the innocent man spent on death row. Most states compensate the wrongfully imprisoned in amounts that can reach millions of dollars, and exonerees can also win settlements from police agencies — awards that can attract predators.
Henry and Leon, proved virtually helpless as hundreds of thousands of dollars of state compensation were siphoned off by their supposed protectors: a sister back home; a lawyer from Orlando, Fla.; a self-proclaimed advocate from Atlanta, and her so-called business partner, and a college instructor from Brooklyn. This is according to documents and interviews by The Marshall Project.
For Henry and Leon decades in prison the prison system and their disabilities would have made a difficult return to society under the best circumstances. But as you will find out there was no support for these men who just wanted to return to a normal life.
Henry became broke within a seven month time period who then began borrowing money at 38 percent interest. He kept his financial plight hidden from friends and supporters from his death row years. But in the fall of 2017, he briefly and wearily opened up when he was handed documents showing he owed $130,000 on $65,000 in recent loans.
By the time a federal judge intervened in the spring of 2017, no trust had been set up for the brothers but money intended for their care had been spent on predatory loans, exorbitant legal fees, multiple cars, women’s jewelry and children’s toys.
Jeffrey Deskovic, an exoneree who established a foundation to help the wrongfully convicted, said he has advised about 60 other exonerees on how to manage compensation and the unwanted attention it brings. The experiences of McCollum and Brown are extreme, he said, but the underlying dynamics are common.
To add salt to the wounds Leon’s sister (Henry’s step sister) Geraldine Brown was named Leon’s guardian despite her inability to manage his mental illness or her finances. Creditors have filed at least 19 liens against her and she had been evicted three times. She had no job or car, and relied on funds raised by the men’s former lawyer’s nonprofit law center for rent and utilities. Nevertheless, the guardianship was granted.
Geraldine took full advantage of this situation. Although guardians can legally spend money only on their wards, Geraldine Brown bought women’s jewelry and shoes, diapers and toys. Motor vehicle records show she also acquired a Dodge van, 2010 Mustang, 2004 BMW and 1995 Lexus.
The court ultimately stripped her of the guardianship and cut off access to her brother’s money. At a hearing, Geraldine Brown admitted she had also asked Henry for thousands of dollars and taken out a $25,000 high-interest loan in Leon’s name.
The judge found her in contempt of court and ordered her jailed.
She conceded in an interview that she should have never been made guardian. When it comes to lawyers, loans and contracts, she said, “I’m incompetent too. I ain’t gonna lie.”
But our real bad guy in this whole story is attorney Patrick Megaro, a lawyer based in Orlando, Fla. On Feb. 27, Geraldine Brown and her brothers finalized a contract with Patrick to take over from Ken Rose (Henry’s lawyer) and additional lawyers suing the police. The contract specified that the family owed Megaro 33 percent of awards, even if they fired him. Legal experts said the contingency clause probably violated state bar rules.
To show you how dedicated Rose was to freeing Henry and Leon, he visited Henry on death row for 20 years: “Every time I saw him, he’d say, ‘I don’t belong here, I’m innocent, when can I go home?’”
Rose worked pro bono on the pardons and had planned to protect the brothers’ money in trusts that guaranteed fixed payments for life, about $3,000 a month each based on the $750,000 awards. And remember Rose raised funds through his non profit law firm to help Geraldine pay the bills that would support Leon.
Meanwhile during the 30 years the men were in prison, Geraldine had visited Leon once; she never went to see Henry. And Megaro only knew of them men once he heard about an anticipation of a settlement or jury award.
In October 2015, North Carolina wrote Megaro a check for $1.5 million, half intended for each client, tax-free. Megaro took more than one-third of each brother’s compensation, according to Leon’s court files and Henry. Payment on the high-interest loan took another $110,000. Each brother was left with less than half of his award.
In an April 2017 interview, he denied taking advantage of his clients.
For his part, Megaro did not set up trusts, even after admitting in court that his clients needed protection from “fraudsters and frivolous spending.” After taking his cut, Megaro directly distributed the remainder to Geraldine, as Leon’s guardian and Henry.
Path To Healing
In the spring of 2017, Megaro filed court papers saying he had reached a settlement with the Red Springs police. Each client would be awarded $500,000.
U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Boyle announced he would not approve any settlement before determining whether Henry was competent to sign the contract with Megaro. Boyle appointed a guardian to investigate. This was when they discovered the predatory loans.
At the next hearing, Megaro angered the judge by repeatedly refusing to reveal his fees for the earlier state compensation. Megaro continued to insist that Henry was competent to hire his own lawyer.
Judge Boyle zeroed in on this claim when Rose took the stand: “Is it your impression that the same vulnerability that subjected him to a false confession and 31 years of death row imprisonment is now operating on his claims for recovery, that he’s subject to manipulation and control?”
Rose responded: “There’s no question in my mind, your honor, that’s true.”
At the next hearing, Boyle declared that the brothers were incompetent and that their contracts with Megaro were void. The judge said he would approve the police settlement, $500,000 for each brother, and would determine Megaro’s fees. Court-appointed guardians would put the money in trust and the brothers would not be obliged to repay their loans out of the settlement.
This of corse made Megaro mad but ultimately he agreed.
The North Carolina State bar on March 19, 2021, suspended Patrick Megaro’s law license for five years, saying he can seek early reinstatement after three years but only if he pays back $250,000 to Henry and Leon. The bar found that Megaro lied to a federal judge and repeatedly put his financial self-interest above the interests of his former clients.
As for Henry he lives out his days in Virginia with his fiancée. A court appointed guardian has been sent to protect Henry’s finances and recover any misappropriated money.
Leon, whose severe disabilities were compounded by the trauma of prison, is living in a North Carolina group home. His sister visits regularly and sometimes takes him home on weekends. In a phone call, Leon said he didn’t belong in a group home. “A judge put me here,” he said. “I want my freedom.”
On May 14, 2021, a federal jury awarded Henry and Leon each $32 million in compensatory damages plus an additional $13 million in punitive damages for a total of $75 million. On that same day, the Robeson County Sheriff’s Office settled its part of the case for $9 million.
While this money will help with the men’s expenses it still doesn’t erase the trauma they faced while in and out of jail.
Both this case highlights teh fundamental concerns towards capital punishment. And I understand both sides of the argument but let me throw some stats at you. Since 1973, over 156 people have been released from death rows in 26 states because of innocence. Nationally, at least one person is exonerated for every 10 that are executed.
Now some prosecutors have set up Conviction Integrity Units, also known as Conviction Review Units — a section of the prosecutor’s office that seeks to prevent, identify, and remedy false convictions. Unlike teams assigned to review individual cases or a series of questionable convictions, CIUs are designed to operate indefinitely and have a dedicated staff.
While this seems like a viable safe guard to prevent innocent people from going to jail or be sentenced to death row the CIUs does have some flaws.
Only 45 out of more than 2,300 prosecutor’s offices nationwide have a CIU. And while CIUs helped secure 40% of exonerations reported in 2018, their impact varies dramatically. Just four CIUs account for 85% of all CIU exonerations, and nine have been in operation for at least three years without producing a single exoneration.
I’m in favor of these Units but I’m sure it’s a funding thing or human error that has lead to drastic statics.
Be sure to check out my podcast Leave The Lights On for more great content!
