Brothers get $75 million after serving 31 years in prison for crime they didn’t commit
Updated May 15, 2021;
Henry McCollum and Leon Brown spent nearly 31 years in prison for a brutal crime they did not commit — one they were convicted of on the basis of confessions that they insisted, for decades, had been coerced.
In a federal courtroom in Raleigh late Friday afternoon, after nearly five hours of deliberation, a jury delivered the half brothers a sense of long-awaited justice.
An eight-person jury awarded McCollum and Brown $31 million each in compensatory damages — $1 million for every year they spent in prison after they were wrongfully convicted, twice, of the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in Red Springs. McCollum and Brown, both intellectually-disabled with IQs in the 50s, were teenagers when they were charged after they signed confessions they insisted they didn’t understand.