Finally! Ten months after a judge declared them innocent, Gov. Pat McCrory has acknowledged what we already knew — Henry McCollum and Leon Brown are innocent of the crime for which they were sentenced to death.
McCrory announced Thursday that he will grant the half brothers a rare pardon of innocence, making them eligible for up to $750,000 each in compensation for the three decades they spent in prison. McCollum spent all those years on death row.
Henry McCollum in Sept. 2014, moments after a judge declared him innocent.
Photo by Jenny Warburg
McCrory’s action came during the same week that conservative Nebraska repealed the death penalty and a new national poll found that a majority in the United States now favor replacing the death penalty with a maximum punishment of life in prison without parole.
McCrory said the pardon was “the right thing to do.” Now, we hope he will do the next right thing: Think about how many other innocent people might still be sitting on death row.
Just look at McCollum’s case. He was sentenced to death at two separate trials, and his death sentence was affirmed by the N.C. Supreme Court. His innocence was discovered only because of a single cigarette butt that the killer dropped at the crime scene, and that the Innocence Inquiry Commission unearthed and tested for DNA 30 years later. Most death row inmates never get a review from the Innocence Inquiry Commission.
“We must reexamine a system that let an innocent man sit on death row for 30 years,” said Ken Rose, the CDPL attorney who represented McCollum for two decades. “How many more innocent people are still awaiting execution? The governor can and should call an official halt to executions in North Carolina until we know the answer to that question.”
While executions are on hold in North Carolina, there is no official moratorium. Our governor has the power to ensure that an innocent person will not be executed in North Carolina. Using that power would show that McCollum and Brown didn’t give up three decades of their lives for nothing.
They were intellectually disabled teens when police took them from their home and pressured them into confessing to a crime they didn’t commit. Let their pardon be a call to action, rather than simply the end to a tragic case.
The post The next “right thing” for McCrory: Halt executions appeared first on NC Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.