Regular readers may have noticed a change on my blog header. I'm a member of and I've added a link to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
A reason why I'm a member of the TCADP seeking to abolish the death penalty in my state was illustrated last week. From Dahlia Lithwick's article in Slate:
The convictions of two mentally disabled half-brothers were vacated and the two men were ordered released by Superior Court Judge Douglas Sasser in North Carolina on Tuesday. They were freed from prison Wednesday. Henry Lee McCollum, 50, had been on death row for 30 years, longer than anyone in North Carolina history. He and Leon Brown, 46, who was serving a life sentence, were convicted for the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. DNA evidence implicated another man, a known sex offender the police had not investigated, despite the fact that he lived next to the crime scene. McCollum and Brown were 19 and 15 at the time local police were investigating the murder of Sabrina Buie. Both confessed to the crime after lengthy police interrogations. They recanted shortly afterāin fact McCollum has recanted 226 timesābut were convicted, largely on the basis of the false confessions, even though no physical evidence connected them to the crime scene. Police also hid exculpatory evidence for years.
A cigarette found at the crime scene now implicates a man who lived a block away from the soybean field where the girlās body was found. He is currently serving a life sentence for a rape and murder that happened less than a month after Buieās rape and murder.
The two teenagers signed confessions after hours of coercive police interrogation, under the erroneous belief that theyād be allowed to go home afterward. Both have since always maintained their innocence, filing various appeals over the intervening decades. It wasnāt until 2010, when the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission came into the case, that the evidence was re-examined seriously. In July, the DNA on the cigarette butt found at the crime scene was revealed to match the DNA of the known sex offender. This led to Tuesdayās extraordinary release order.