Two US men declared innocent after 30 years in jail
Two men convicted of murder in the United States and served 30 years behind bars have been freed after DNA evidence implicated another man. ● Henry McCollum and Leon Brown had been in prison for 30 years in North Carolina since being convicted of raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl in 1983. Superior Court Judge Douglass Sasser ordered the immediate release of McCollum, 50, and Brown, 46. McCollum had been on death row for decades and his half brother Brown was serving a life sentence. Ken Rose, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham, has represented McCollum for 20 years. [He said,] "Henry watched dozens of people be hauled away for execution. He would become so distraught he had to be put in isolation. It's impossible to put into words what these men have been through and how much they have lost." Their convictions were overturned after DNA evidence from a cigarette butt recovered at the crime scene implicated another man with a history of rape and murder. The DNA shows that the real murderer was a 74-year-old man who is currently serving a life sentence for a different murder.