Henry McCollum and Leon Brown
Henry McCollum and Leon Brown are two African American men who were wrongly convicted of raping and murdering 11-year-old Sabrina Buie in Red Springs, North Carolina, in 1983. They were teenagers at the time—McCollum was 19 and Brown was 15—and both had intellectual disabilities. Police interrogations were intense and lengthy, and both boys signed confessions that authorities used to convict them, even though there was no physical evidence tying them to the crime. Other people who were mentioned later had alibis or were not connected to the crime.
Their trials in the mid-1980s led to first-degree murder and rape convictions. McCollum received the death penalty, and Brown, who was the youngest on North Carolina’s death row at the time, was also sentenced to death (later reduced to life for the rape). There were numerous problems with the case: the key confessions did not match all the facts, fingerprints on beers at the scene did not match either man, and important evidence had been withheld or ignored. Despite these issues, both men were convicted.
Over the next decade, the brothers continued to fight their convictions. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, their sentences were revisited. McCollum was again convicted of murder and given a death sentence in 1991; Brown was retried in 1992 and convicted only of the rape, resulting in a life sentence. Their appeals and new investigations continued for years, with advocates arguing that their intellectual disabilities left them particularly vulnerable to coercive police questioning.
A turning point came with the work of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission. Between 2010 and 2014, DNA testing on crime-scene evidence showed that Roscoe Artis, a different man with a history of sexual violence who lived near the crime scene, was the actual perpetrator. The commission concluded that McCollum and Brown were innocent and deserved exoneration. In September 2014, a Robeson County judge formally exonerated them, though their release was delayed until the next day. In June 2015, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory pardoned Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, clearing the way for them to seek compensation for their wrongful imprisonment.
The men also pursued civil rights lawsuits. In a landmark federal case, a jury in 2017 awarded McCollum and Brown a total of about $75 million for their years on death row, with roughly $31 million to each man, plus punitive damages. The Robeson County Sheriff's Office and others also paid settlements. Over the next few years, the amount they could actually receive was reduced by court decisions and prior settlements, leaving them with an estimated final award in the low-to-mid $60 millions range. The case drew national attention to wrongful convictions, particularly those involving vulnerable defendants and cases built largely on confessions rather than solid physical evidence.
After their release, McCollum moved to Virginia with his fiancée and began writing a book about his life. Brown, who faced serious mental health challenges in prison and after, required ongoing care and lived in group homes and care facilities. Roscoe Artis, the man ultimately linked to Buie’s murder, died in 2020 while serving a life sentence.
Henry McCollum and Leon Brown’s story is widely cited as a powerful reminder of how easily wrongful convictions can happen, especially when people are vulnerable and when crucial evidence is ignored or hidden.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 21:01 (CET).