After nearly 31 years in prison for the alleged rape and murder of an eleven-year-old, a jury in North Carolina, USA, awarded two innocent half-brothers $ 75 million in compensation.
The jury found it proven Friday that two police officers pressured African-Americans Henry McCollum and Leon Brown into signing confessions after their arrest in 1983.
The then 19-year-old McCollum and his half-brother Brown, who was four years his junior, who performed in the lower end of the intelligence tests, were sentenced to death at the time. McCollum spent nearly 31 years on death row, more than any other death row inmate in North Carolina. Brown, whose death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, went down in the state's judicial history as one of the youngest people to be sentenced to death. The half-brothers were released from prison in 2014 after a DNA comparison found someone convicted of another crime to be a rapist and murderer of the eleven-year-old.
With the help of civil rights organizations, McCollum and Brown brought several lawsuits against the town of Red Springs, where they were arrested, the Robeson County Sheriff, and two of the investigating officers over the next several years. The jury has now awarded McCollum and Brown $ 1 million for each year behind bars and an additional $ 13 million in damages.