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Season Five Home For the Holidays 1
180 Plays21 days ago
In Today’s Episode, we put together our Home for the Holiday cases.
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Sources:
Various News Sources Mentioned by Name
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Content Warning
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
Holiday Tradition: Miscarriages of Justice
00:00:22
Speaker
This is True Crime XS.
00:00:29
Speaker
So it's that time of year again, we decided, I guess, maybe three or four years ago that when the holidays rolled around, we would do more content than usual. And you and I We plot and plan these out. i think I think this year I started in maybe May, um trying to determine what the topic would be. And we liked the theme of Home for the Holidays, which was about exonerations and and missing persons. And I wanted to take it a little step further and highlight, because we do about 25, 26 episodes this time of year,
00:01:09
Speaker
um ah cases that were considered, for whatever reason, miscarriages of justice. And I i picked out um a big stack of those cases and I started going through them I think in May and June and sort of went back and looked at what we've done in the past. And
Understanding False Confessions
00:01:30
Speaker
we landed on um cases that I'll go ahead and I'll warn everyone, most of the cases that we're covering this holiday season ah between now and Christmas, they're actually worse somehow than most of the exoneration cases we covered. I'd say today's case is particularly egregious, but I thought using it to start off would kind of highlight how these cases can go.
00:02:01
Speaker
You think that's an accurate description? Yes, I agree. I'm always on the lookout for the skew because this is this is a particularly bad case, but like I'm always anytime there's wrongful convictions and I'm always looking for a trend and like what are we seeing? Like what was missed? What?
00:02:23
Speaker
what was assumed, that kind of thing. you know um I believe, I can't remember now if it was our first or second holiday series edition. I talked about the three culprits, the cases that have three culprits in them. Yeah.
00:02:42
Speaker
And that was one of the things that I had ah kind of come upon. And this this is only two culprits, but there's a lot of the same elements present. Yeah, there's a lot of, I don't know how to explain. I sort of call this, for lack of a better word, abuse by the police. But really what this is, it's a case where there are people walking around in society right now that They just have complete trust in everyone. And they don't totally understand what's happening when someone in authority sits them down and starts asking questions. And i've you know a question that's come up a lot for me, I would say,
00:03:26
Speaker
starting in about 2008, 2009, outside of this arena and how we present things is how can someone give a false confession to something? And you and I have talked about that over the years. And I think the truth is you never know on the day what you're gonna say or what you're gonna do or what Might happen to you that could land you in a situation similar to the one we're going to talk about today and if you were to be a person who had additional needs in the world in terms of how you interact with people socially or how you're taking care of i think.
00:04:09
Speaker
Right there, you can easily double the odds of something as bad as this case happened. Right. I agree that the question is, why would somebody confess to something that they didn't do? But I think that over time, a lot of what drives us is trying to figure out why would someone elicit a confession?
00:04:33
Speaker
from someone who didn't do something. You mean from the law enforcement or prosecution's perspective? Correct. Because sometimes it it's not as obvious, especially I like to think more recent cases, there's been lessons learned over the years. I wouldn't say that definitively, but it seems like hindsight being very clear a lot of these cases are older. But sometimes it's really hard to see where law enforcement was coming from when they were like typing up this confession to be signed by the perpetrator that just told them a fictional account of what occurred, right? right And sometimes it gets to be, it goes so far. I don't presume to know
00:05:29
Speaker
all of it. Some of the signs are blaring and I have a hard time figuring out what the angle for law enforcement would be. I don't think there's any singular angle. I think there's a number of things that happen. ah You know, I'll be blunt. Like what you're going to learn about today is that we're going to be talking about ah a person actually giving part of it away to people. I think you already said that there were two culprits here. When when people have a lower intelligence quotient, like on at least on paper, um you know I don't know that law enforcement has always been too far away from that. And I say that because the hiring
Case Study: McCollum and Brown's Wrongful Conviction
00:06:15
Speaker
practices, particularly in the United States,
00:06:18
Speaker
for what you need to be law enforcement is pretty fascinating if anyone's ever looked at it. And just based on what is still today the pretty kind of standard practice of how you hire law enforcement, you get this mixed bag of people intelligence-wise and intuition-wise And the idea has always been that like the best ones, the good police, the good investigators, the good detectives, the good prosecutors will sort of rise to the top. But it's such a thinkless job that a lot of those people divert and realize because they are smart and they are intuitive and they are good detectives.
00:07:02
Speaker
and Maybe this is not the best path in life. So what we're left with is a series of people that we've hired and sometimes they're kind of plug and play. It's like this guy was an okay patrol officer. He's not you know the most brilliant guy, but we need to do something to fill this void over here in investigations. So we slide that guy in there.
00:07:25
Speaker
and he just sort of bumbles along. Unfortunately, what you get from television and movies is not the reality when it comes to law enforcement. And I'm not saying all police, I'm saying a percentage of them, which I think is where you could potentially find the bulk of your wrongful convictions and the cases that end up leading to exonerations, particularly when it's as egregious as a what we're about to talk about.
00:07:53
Speaker
So are you saying that you feel like it could be a situation where they have trouble identifying their own kind? Yeah. and Yeah. Like it's interesting because I think that like a lot of like catchphrases and and and terms related to bad guys and good guys are probably interchangeable on a level that people don't understand. But I i think for the most part, if you've got a really brilliant criminal,
00:08:23
Speaker
and a really brilliant detective. The odds of the two of them meeting each other are like almost zero because the criminal's so good he gets away with it and the detective is so good he realizes he doesn't want to be a detective and he goes and does something else.
00:08:40
Speaker
Wow. you realize that I completely agree with what you're saying, but I've never thought of it that way. So that's why these like movies where you've got these two brilliant people playing cat and mouse are like less than 0.01% of reality.
00:08:58
Speaker
it's It's true everywhere with law enforcement. Like the higher up you get in terms of sort of prestige with agencies, you probably don't get as much of the lower intelligence. But really all you have to do to say join the FBI is to get an advanced degree. And the FBI took a lot of accountants for years. That was a big deal, linguists and accountants. So you really either only had to speak another language,
00:09:25
Speaker
where you had to really understand the statistical analysis of math and currency. well Those cases generally lead, and and that included like history and law and like other um advanced degrees that they would bring people in with. Statistically speaking, you're going to get a slightly better result out of the FBI. It's not going to be a 0.01% chance because they're really going to be cracking down on
00:09:57
Speaker
Like a higher level criminal that's just the way that things work but the truth about most people who commit a homicide or multiple homicides is they were never the the smartest guy and They eventually will get caught it's strange here because like some of the most Intelligent people in the situation we're about to talk about they almost don't get caught and and I can go on about this and I probably will talk a little bit more about this over the holiday season cuz like it's interesting to look at like how the cases get to where we're having to continue to deal with them long after adjudicated this case is particularly
00:10:38
Speaker
ah long in the tooth time-wise. There's a lot to this. I want to point out with these, here's kind of the general sources for the holiday season. The state that we're talking about, I pulled a lot from their public safety and offender information pages. I've used, again,
00:10:57
Speaker
the Michigan School of Law's registry, the National Registry of Exonerations, multiple Innocence Projects pages. I pulled from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. Pretty much every case I pulled at least one local news article. The older cases are almost exclusively from newspapers dot.com. And as always, I pulled a lot from the court records.
00:11:20
Speaker
related to the cases here. With the particular case that we're starting with today, I will tell you there's a great Wikipedia out there. The cases that we're covering, they are older cases and people look at those and go, I'm not interested in that. I was because this case is complex.
00:11:38
Speaker
all the cases that we're going to be talking about for the Christmas series sort of pull from the same collective sources. And if it's anything strange or it' somebody's article that I really liked or some particular Innocence Project that did something amazing, I'll talk about them individually. But today's case is our first home for the holidays for 2024. And this is the case of Henry McCollum, which has a secondary case, Leon Brown, that is tied to it. And these are two African-American men who were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death for a murder that they did not commit. So Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, they were both born in Jersey City, New Jersey. Henry was born March 26 of 1964, and Leon was born November 24 of 1967.
00:12:35
Speaker
As of this recording, they're both alive. Mamie Brown was their mom and Mamie Brown was a native of Robeson County, North Carolina. She had moved up to Jersey City to be with her mother. Both Henry and Leon, they end up being raised by their grandmother.
00:12:55
Speaker
and an aunt and uncle and some other older cousins in Jersey City housing projects. Both of these guys, Henry and Leon, very early on, they are put into what it at the time was known as special education classes. With Henry, they went so far as to move him to a school and the school classified him as an educatively mentally retarded student. That meant that like, and these these are all quotes that I'm using, he was considered to be profoundly intellectually disabled, but that there were some aspects of his life that the education system had put him through a series of tests
00:13:45
Speaker
where they felt like to some degree it was worth educating him and continuing his education. But then when he was 16 years old, a psychologist at that school, they suggested that Henry might function better if he lived in a group home. Henry ends up dropping out of high school and at the time it was said that his reading level was something like a first or second grader.
00:14:11
Speaker
Leon was functionally illiterate, meaning he could get out and about and do things, but he could barely read or write, including his own name. And this would include up to the point that the two of them arrested. By 1983, Henry and Leon have moved to a place called Red Springs, North Carolina.
00:14:37
Speaker
Red Springs, North Carolina, I've talked about it before as being tied to the Dixie Mafia. It is a very small town of about 5,000 people today. In 1983, there were less than a thousand residents. On September 23rd of 1983, a little girl named Sabrina Bowie, who's 11 years old, she leaves her home in Red Springs and Some reports say that she was headed into town to go to a little video arcade. Her sister was four years old at the time that Sabrina is leaving her house to go to this arcade.
00:15:21
Speaker
She would later claim that when she saw Sabrina, Sabrina said to her she was leaving the house and she was taking a bicycle back to the house of Leon Brown. So Leon at this time, I think he's about 15 years old. 83, let's do some math. 83 to 67, 33.
00:15:47
Speaker
Right at 15. Yeah, Leon is 15 years old at the time. He's not quite 16. Sabrina's dad, Ronnie, he reports her missing after she doesn't come home the night of the 23rd and he can't find her the day of the 24th. So on the 25th, she gets reported missing. And on the 26th, her body is found and she's only partly clothed.
00:16:17
Speaker
By the medical examiner's report, Sabrina had been raped and she had been suffocated by having her own underwear stuffed down her throat. The police chief at the time, a guy named Luther Haggins, he was the police chief in Red Springs, he described Sabrina's killing as one of the most brutal murder cases he had investigated.
00:16:40
Speaker
because it involved a child who had been severely a abused. The search for Sabrina had only gone on for two days, the 25th and the 26th, and they found her body. But more than 25 police officers had gotten involved. From the crime scene, police had recovered multiple pieces of physical evidence.
00:17:04
Speaker
They found beer cans, they found Sabrina's bloody clothing, they found sticks and a piece of plywood that had blood on them, and they also found a cigarette butt.
00:17:17
Speaker
In a nearby field, they recovered additional evidence and they sort of made the presumption at the time that the actual murder had taken place in the field and that s Sabrina's body had been dragged away from the field so that it would be harder to find her. On September 29th, A 17-year-old Robeson County High School student told police about rumors that Henry McCollum was involved in Sabrina's murder. And he said that not only was he responsible for Sabrina's murder, but that back in Jersey City, he had robbed a pimp.
00:18:04
Speaker
And he had attempted to rape a young girl in 1982. The police talked to Henry McCollum. And they bring him to the police station in Robeson County, the to the sheriff's office, and they start to question him.
00:18:22
Speaker
Henry's take on everything is that he saw Sabrina on September 24th, but that when he saw her, she was walking to one of the local stores and he denied having any involvement in the crime.
00:18:37
Speaker
A few days after this happens, and also much later on, the high school student who had implicated Henry in this, they would admit that they had fabricated the stories because, um this is a female student by the way, because she thought that Henry, quote, acted strange. But in 1983, the stories were enough that the police kept coming back to Henry to talk to him.
00:19:05
Speaker
Henry ends up going through an hours-long interrogation. And during this time, the police tell Henry that there's a witness who has placed him at the crime scene, not seeing Sabrina walking to the store, but at the field, which is close to where her body was found and where they believed she had been killed. The investigators in this case used racial slurs towards Henry.
00:19:35
Speaker
They told him that if he would sign a form that they had for him and tell them the truth, quote, they would let him go. Henry does not have an attorney present during this interrogation. Oh, since this is 1983, Henry is 19 years old.
00:19:58
Speaker
So he's just old enough that like they're allowed to interrogate him, but that's not going to be the case with Leon. Now, Henry does not have an attorney president or anyone with him during this interrogation.
00:20:17
Speaker
After being promised that he can go home if he just confessed, Henry signs a Miranda waiver and he signs a false confession to the crime. And all he does in this confession is repeat the same incriminating accusation that police had used to get him to do this. The story that the police have concocted for Henry here is that Henry was part of a gang rape and murder of s Sabrina with four other teenage boys in the area.
00:20:52
Speaker
One of the other named teenage boys is 15-year-old Leon Brown. While Henry is being interrogated, Leon arrives at the police station. He is there with his mother and with his sister. They take... They're half-brothers. They're half-brothers. Right. they have their Their mom is Mamie Brown. So Mamie Brown is here at the police station now. And there's and their sister is here.
00:21:20
Speaker
So Leon is pulled in and interrogated in the same manner that Henry is interrogated. According to later accounts, Joel Locklear, who is the Robeson County detective interrogating Leon Brown, threatens to put Leon in the gas chamber if he doesn't sign the form to say that he understands and is waving his Miranda rights.
00:21:51
Speaker
According to later court records, Joel Locklear then drafts a confession and it implicates Leon, Henry, and three other teenagers. The problem with all of this is the three other teenagers had airtight alibis.
00:22:10
Speaker
or had been otherwise proven that there was no way they could be connected to this crime, to the point that one of them had been out of state until the day that the detectives came to talk to him.
00:22:25
Speaker
Leon Brown, as I previously stated, he had trouble writing and reading to the point that on his confession, he had to write his name out in large block capital letters. Henry's interrogation goes on until about two thirty in the morning.
00:22:45
Speaker
He gets up at the end of it all and he walks out of the police station. Authorities ask him, they stop him and they ask him, where are you going? And the police told him that he could leave when the interview was over. He asked, I just want to go home now. Can I go home now?
00:23:03
Speaker
While he's asking, they arrest him. Years later, Henry would recount what was happening here. And he would say that he had never been under such immense pressure with people yelling and screaming at him. He said that he was scared and that he had done what they wanted him to do so that he could get out of that police station and go home. So we have these confessions. We've got Henry's confession and we've got Leon's confession that are all put together by Robeson County Detective Joel Locklear. The problem was, Joel was not thinking very clearly as he was writing this out and threatening these kids, and numerous inconsistencies were noted between the two confessions.
00:23:50
Speaker
They actually conflicted in details regarding who was involved with the crime, how they had met this victim, how they had committed the murder, and why the other boys who were part of their confessions were unable to be tied to this crime due to having alibis. Did it sound like they were both telling two completely different fictional stories?
00:24:16
Speaker
Yeah, it did. So because of all the inconsistencies here, the authorities should have stopped everything and they should have taken a look at this, but they don't. They end up arresting Leon Brown, and on September 29th, local authorities in Robeson County, they charge both Henry McCollum and Leon Brown with Sabrina's rape and murder. Henry gets put in the Robeson County jail, and he gets held without bond. This is 1983, by the way.
00:24:46
Speaker
Leon is held at a juvenile facility in Fayetteville, North Carolina. No charges ever get filed against the other three teenagers that are a part of both Henry and Leon's signed confessions. Down the road, Henry and Leon's attorneys are both going to state that the confessions were coerced and that the main reason would be that both teens were suffering from intellectual disabilities.
00:25:15
Speaker
Henry's IQ has been measured around 50, and Leon's IQ has been measured in the high 40s. We've talked about this before, but the APA, or the American Psychiatric Association, they generally consider IQs measured below 70 to be indicative of intellectual disability.
00:25:37
Speaker
And this was known in 1983. This was not something like that has just been made up in recent years. Henry was said to have had brain damage and an extremely low ability to comprehend what to do with language. During one trial for the two, a neuropsychologist would testify that Henry did not have the intellectual capability or capacity to understand what his Miranda rights were or any of the languages that authorities used in writing the confession that he signed. On October 22nd of 1983,
00:26:14
Speaker
while Henry and Leon are in jail awaiting to go on trial for s Sabrina's murder. A missing persons report is filed for an 18 year old named Joanne Brockman. Have you ever heard of this case by the way, Joanne Brockman?
00:26:29
Speaker
only as it has to do with this case. Okay. So later in the day on October 22nd, Joanne's body is found and it's discovered that she had been raped and strangled. Witnesses claim to have seen Joanne and a man named Roscoe Artis.
00:26:46
Speaker
A-R-T-I-S, who at the time would have been 43 years old. He was a serial rapist, a suspected serial killer, and a repeat high-level sexual offender who lived near Sabrina's family, and he lived literally feet away from where s Sabrina's body had been found. Roscoe, his history of sexual assaults on women, it dates all the way back to 1957.
00:27:16
Speaker
At the time of both Sabrina and Joanne's murders, he was suspected in the 1980 rape and murder of a 30-year-old woman named Bernice Moss in Gaston County, North Carolina. So they bring Roscoe Artisan to talk to him about Joanne's murder. He quickly confesses. And over the course of several interviews, Roscoe tells them He suggests to them, and he directly tells them, that Henry and Leon were not responsible for Sabrina's killing.
00:27:57
Speaker
About a year later, in August of 1984, Roscoe ends up being sentenced to death for Joanne Brockman's murder. Five years later, his death sentence is reduced to life in prison.
00:28:09
Speaker
Before the commutation of his death sentence in Joanne's case, Roscoe repeatedly told two other inmates on death row that Henry and Leon had not committed s Sabrina's murder. Okay, so the first trial gets started in October of 1984. Henry and Leon are facing a joint trial in Robeson County, North Carolina.
00:28:36
Speaker
The prosecutors down there in the Robeson area for that prosecutorial district, they prided themselves on having an exorbitantly high number of death penalty cases. I have read, and I don't know if this is true, that Joe Freeman Britt had been labeled in sometime in the mid 80s by Guinness Book of World Records as the quote, deadliest prosecutor in America, which is not a good thing.
00:29:04
Speaker
It's actually a little bit crazy that that is a thing at all. Right. Um, I realized that I believe that the prosecution, uh, the prosecutors worked in two counties. um model It's one district. Okay. One district. And so I don't really know. I don't know exactly how many people are there, but like we talked about earlier, this was a very small place. It's still a small place to this day. Yep.
00:29:30
Speaker
And so it's kind of odd, right? Just under the circumstances that that would be a point of pride for them. it's It's just a weird thing that I feel like should have raised some red flags.
00:29:44
Speaker
Well, with Joe Freeman Britt, he has passed away, I think, in the last 10 years or so. It doesn't change things. He is considered the quote, deadliest prosecutor. I can tell you that he was a very big dude. um I think he was around six, seven.
00:30:03
Speaker
He was obnoxious and he became known for a number of Brady violations and other types of misconduct later on. But he was ah he was a lawyer for a long time and then he was a judge.
00:30:16
Speaker
um He, in 1987, when North Carolina put together the new Superior Court judgeships, they put one that was mostly over Robeson County. They were trying to deal with the size of the district. Their actual goal had been to allow more minority candidates a chance at winning judicial office to balance out some of the diversity and who was on the bench. He ran as a pro-death penalty Democrat in January of 1988.
The Fight for Exoneration
00:30:45
Speaker
and he ended up fighting back and forth with this lawyer, Julian Pierce. Julian Pierce was, I think he was a Lumbee tribe member, but he had been an attorney down there and he was sought as an opportunity for him to be what he believed would be the first Native American or tribal member Superior Court judge.
00:31:09
Speaker
So he resigned his position as Director of Lumbee River Legal Services, and he went up against Joe Britt on March 26, which was right before the election in 1988. They found ah Julian's body in his home with shotgun wounds, his head, chest, and stomach. Now, the story goes that the local cops had located the murderer, but when they were trying to arrest him, he killed himself. The rumbling was always that Britt killed him or had him killed.
00:31:40
Speaker
So he ends up automatically declared the winner of the primary election. And there was no general election opposition from Republicans at the time. But one of the things I always thought was interesting was it was all kind of considered a sham.
00:31:57
Speaker
But Julian Pierce actually won the vote because they collected the ballot since it was an automatic quote win for Joe Britt. They collected the votes and Julian had won about 11,000 votes to 8,000 votes. It was like some odd number. I thought that was interesting that he was attached to this case when I was reading because I've always heard stories about Joe Britt, but seeing it here was very interesting. The prosecution kicks off this first trial.
00:32:28
Speaker
The main pieces of evidence that they put against Henry and Leon are these signed confessions. There is a witness for the prosecution who is a 17-year-old named L.P. Sinclair. The story is that L.P. claimed to have heard Henry and Leon talking about how they wanted to rape Sabrina prior to it ever happening, and that after they had done it, Henry came and told L.P. about it.
00:32:52
Speaker
Under cross-examination, L.P. Sinclair admitted that police had interviewed him three different times before Henry and Leon's arrest and that he never said anything to the local investigators about Henry or Leon. They had multiple beer cans at the scene, entered into evidence. The fingerprints they pulled from these beer cans do not match Henry and they do not match Leon.
00:33:19
Speaker
And for all the testing they did they did of the different items that they kept for evidence, there is no physical or forensic evidence that links either one of them to Sabrina's murder. In spite of all that, on October 25th of 1984, both Henry and Leon are convicted of first degree murder, and they are then sentenced to death.
00:33:44
Speaker
Leon is 16 years old, which at the time in North Carolina, it made him the youngest person on death row. In 1988, about three years later, the North Carolina Supreme Court takes a look at all of this and they find an error or the trial judge neglected to provide proper instructions to the jury relating to the fact that it was their duty to consider each defendant's guilt or innocence separately. So this had this was not in the trial instructions at the time. And because of that, the North Carolina Supreme Court
00:34:24
Speaker
They overturned Henry and Leon's death sentences. The judge also determined that the way things had gone down, Henry and Leon were entitled to separate trials. So in 1991, Henry goes up on trial, and he is again convicted of first degree murder and rape, and he is sentenced to death.
00:34:48
Speaker
A year later, in 1992, Leon is retried. But the jury looks at that case and they decide that they only think he's guilty of s Sabrina's rape.
00:35:01
Speaker
And he ends up sentenced to life imprisonment. Leon's conviction for the rape gets upheld in 1995, and his appeal options at that point are considered exhausted. They are complete. They run full cycle. These guys both are housed in central prison to start, and they are able to see each other for a period of time. Henry works as a janitor during his time on death row.
00:35:26
Speaker
His attorneys said that he was deeply affected and traumatized by every execution of a North Carolina death row inmate. He was severely depressed and that every time an execution occurred, he would become suicidal. The attorneys for Henry also said that other inmates would target him for violence and abuse.
00:35:45
Speaker
Following the execution of a man named John Rook in 1986, Henry tried to kill himself. ah Later on, Henry would say that Rook had become his first friend on death row. And he said that I didn't look at him like a killer. People can change in prison. And he said that John Rook was like a brother to him. While Henry was on death row, he experienced 42 executions. And at some point, he told his sister that he was tired. He did not know when they were going to kill him. Now Leon had multiple episodes of psychosis during his imprisonment. It got worse but when he eventually gets released. He has been prescribed antidepressants and antipsychotics. From the stories that he told their sister, he said that while he was in prison, he was raped by inmates.
00:36:39
Speaker
and that guards would tie him to his bunk. He had multiple hunger strikes on his infractions list and there were multiple uncooperative and failure to follow commands on his infractions list.
00:36:54
Speaker
But Leon did learn how to read. Now, Henry and Leon, they visited each other from the early 90s until 2012. They ended up being separated at that point in time based on where they were. And they started to write to each other every month. While they're in there, Mamie Brown dies and Mamie Brown's mom dies. So the people that have raised them have passed away. The attorneys for Henry and the attorneys for Leon, they challenged their convictions at every chance they could get. They had new attorneys come on and come and go over the years. During one reopening of the case, one of the attorneys discovered that in October of 1984, which would have been
00:37:40
Speaker
in the days prior to the first joint trial. Police from the Red Springs Police Department had asked the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation to complete a fingerprint comparison between prints found on beer cans and the prints that had been collected from Roscoe artists after his confession to the murder of Joanne Brockman. This request was never disclosed to Henry or Leon's attorneys.
00:38:11
Speaker
There were no documents confirming what type of comparison had ever been completed, but there was evidence that on the same day that this had happened, that Joe Britt, who, he's not a cop, he was not a Red Springs police officer, but he had called the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation Crime Lab, and he had requested that they cancel that request.
00:38:36
Speaker
to examine Roscoe artists' fingerprints and the beer can prints. The beer cans were confirmed to have been from Sabrina's crime scene. Fast forward from then, 2004, Henry gets a motion from one of his attorneys. They're asking that some of the DNA evidence from the crime scene be retested.
00:38:58
Speaker
So as a result, the court ordered that DNA testing be done on the cigarette butt that had been found near Sabrina's body. The DNA from the cigarette butt did not match Henry and it did not match Leon. But due to limitations in DNA testing at the time, there was no way to definitively match the DNA profile to another suspect.
00:39:21
Speaker
So the test results had been deemed insufficient to warrant the release of either Henry or Leon. Around 2010, another inmate suggested that Leon should request help from the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission. Okay, I'm going to pause on that for one second.
00:39:44
Speaker
These guys have been in prison since 1983. They're in jail. They have their trial. They stay in jail. Things are overturned. They go back to trial separately in 91 and 92. And they have just been sitting in prison all this time. That's my whole life, almost. Yeah, it's pretty awful. Yeah.
00:40:08
Speaker
So Leon, because of his disabilities, he was not able to fully fill out the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission's forms. So another inmate had to help him. The Innocence Inquiry Commission, they agreed in 2010 to take a look at Leon's case. And they went and requested a comparison of the DNA evidence that had been collected at s Sabrina's crime scene.
00:40:35
Speaker
to other profiles in the state police database.
00:40:41
Speaker
This DNA testing confirmed a match with Roscoe Artus. So then the IIC spent another four years investigating the case and analyzing physical evidence. They took to interviewing other inmates and they went and interviewed Roscoe.
00:41:01
Speaker
They came to the conclusion that all along the Red Springs Police Department had known that the evidence at the crime scene at s Sabrina's death would not match Henry or Leon, and they had hidden it from Henry and Leon's defense teams. They end up requesting that the DNA profile from boxes of evidence collected from Sabrina's murder be put through CODIS.
00:41:30
Speaker
In July 2014, the testing returns yet another positive match for Roscoe Artist. After this CODIS testing is done, Henry and Leon's attorneys with the Innocence Inquiry, they go through and they find a pile of unsolved sexual assaults that are all attributable to Roscoe Artis. So in 2014, in August, lawyers that worked with North Carolina Center for Death Penalty Litigation, they file a motion requesting that both of the brothers' convictions be overturned and that the charges against them be dismissed.
00:42:08
Speaker
The motion included an affidavit from a death row inmate with whom Roscoe had discussed Sabrina's case. This was a man named Andrew Craig who went by Sonny. Sonny Craig was removed from death row.
00:42:23
Speaker
And he confirmed that Roscoe had denied that Henry or Leon had anything to do with s Sabrina's murder, but he said that Roscoe had never confessed directly to the murder itself. Sonny also alleged that Roscoe seemed like he had been living with guilt for so long due to the evidence that had been withheld that would have freed Henry and Leon, that he seemed burdened by it.
00:42:49
Speaker
Artists also relayed specific obscure information about the murder to Craig, including how she was killed and the color of her underwear. Based on the evidence in the motions, Henry and Leon's attorneys were able to get them a hearing. So this hearing is scheduled for September of 2014. Richard Dieter, who was an executive director at the time for the Death Penalty Information Center, he released a statement related to Henry and Leon's cases.
00:43:21
Speaker
And that statement was that the conviction and sentencing to death of two black teenagers with intellectual disabilities, based almost entirely on shaky confessions obtained under extreme duress, sounds like a case from another era. It would be naive to assume there are no such cases among the thousands of inmates who remain on death row or that similar mistakes weren't made among the nearly 1,400 people who have been executed.
00:43:49
Speaker
Henry and Leon lost 30 years of their lives due to this injustice. If they had been executed as planned, the price would have been infinitely higher. Taking the death penalty off the table would at least guarantee that innocent people will not be executed. So on September 2nd, 2014, the IIC staff and the brothers' attorneys, they all got together and presented evidence of their clients' innocence at a hearing. They requested that a Robeson County judge free both men.
00:44:19
Speaker
Robeson County District Attorney, Johnson Brett, because why not keep it in the family, did not oppose the request saying the state does not have a case and the whole case rests on the confessions and the DNA evidence through those confessions under the bus. After hearing the evidence, rather than granting the brothers a new trial, the judge declared Henry and Leon innocent. Henry was still shackled during the hearing in which he was formally exonerated.
00:44:46
Speaker
Many of his and Leon's family members were present, including Henry's father, James, who stated after the hearing, we waited all these long years for this. Thank you, Jesus.
00:44:58
Speaker
Also in attendance were a judge who had once voted to affirm Henry's death sentence and some of Sabrina's family members. Due to Henry and Leon needing to have some paperwork filed with their attorneys, the release was delayed until the following day, September the 3rd. But at the time of this release, Henry was the longest serving death row inmate in North Carolina's history, having spent 31 years under the constant sentence of death. So just pausing there for a second, what do you think of this story overall?
00:45:28
Speaker
I think that it's a good sentiment as to why, even if you believe that death could be an appropriate punishment in some cases,
Death Penalty Debate
00:45:37
Speaker
we may not have a confident and enough judicial process to impose it on anyone. I would agree with that. i I like to think that the death penalty is a tool we should be able to use. and like You and I have this conversation from time to time where if I see something on video and I just know it happened that it was atrocious, I lean towards like wanting to put someone to death in murder cases. At this point, I'm starting to question whether that's the right move on my part to think that way.
00:46:12
Speaker
well and yeah know Honestly, I don't have a position really on it. I feel like it's so far out there. I've said this before on the show. Even if I objected to it, ah like very adamantly, there's nothing I could do about it, right? yeah At this juncture. And so I just, I don't really think about it, but if anything, like without saying,
00:46:40
Speaker
anything about it from a moral point of view. I would say that this case and other cases that we've seen that are equally as atrocious in, you know, somebody ending up going from death or to being and innocent and getting out of prison. It's still relatively rare, but it attests to why perhaps it the death penalty shouldn't be implemented. Now, I feel like it's used less now, especially like this case has several different numbers that sort of come up the entire time that he was on death row. He witnessed so many of his fellow death rowies being actually put to death, right? yeah
00:47:33
Speaker
And so that would have been a number over a period of time. Of course, that's just one area in one state, right? That's having this... um Well, I guess states only have the one death row, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so it doesn't seem like a whole lot, but like it seems like now we have even less people being put to death.
00:47:56
Speaker
But if anything, I think it speaks to that. Now, further than that, you have a situation here where it starts out ah these two young men are bullied into closing a case for some law enforcement, right? It becomes apparent at different points, but obviously right before they are finally exonerated, it becomes apparent that the actual perpetrator was sort of right in front of them the whole time.
00:48:34
Speaker
Yeah, and and we kind of get lucky that, like, he's caught and put away. So it's not like the double tragedy of them being put away for something they didn't do and more and more crimes happening because that person is free. Right, but some more crimes did happen, right? Yeah, yeah in the immediate aftermath, yes. But they arrested him for Joanna's murder pretty quickly. Right, and it seems to me like there could have been a link made there and I feel like some really important training that could be had we talked
00:49:16
Speaker
briefly at the beginning of this episode about how we we are kind of led through different avenues to presume that the most skilled or most inherently good law enforcement officers will rise to the top. yeah And then we talked about how like perhaps that doesn't happen because the really good ones are like, this is not what I want to be doing with my life. yeah And so perhaps I'm training that if I would take away anything from this particular case, I think that I would say it's okay to be wrong. Yeah, it really is. Yes.
00:49:58
Speaker
And because I feel like that's where this kind of goes. ah for Now, I didn't and I looked back and I i still don't completely understand why um Henry was initially considered. Right. I think that he was implicated by the person at school. I think they mentioned it. But that's a little bit.
00:50:25
Speaker
It's not entirely clear, right? yeah So I don't know what cast their suspicion. Obviously, law enforcement is going to go off of a tip that they receive. Now it's stated very clearly the person at school that thought he was weird and you know went to police and said, oh, maybe it was him and gave some other information that seemed incriminating. Four days later, they had recanted it. And then again, right before they were exonerated,
00:50:53
Speaker
They said, I made that up, right? They were a kid. And so if that's, you know, if they got a tip and that's where it led them, fine. But it seems like there are several terms here that could have alleviated this issue if law enforcement that was working on the case specifically had been trained that it was okay to be wrong. beyond And that's just really lacking here. And you know especially since there was this prosecuting team that prided themselves
00:51:35
Speaker
in these really heinous accomplishments what they felt like were accomplishments and having like the most death row convictions and being in the Genesis book of world records as you know the deadliest prosecutors like these are really lame career achievements in my opinion especially when we have this result like 30 years later right that like you've got two brothers that weren't I mean, one of them ends up not being on death row, but you know it when it's really, you're focusing on the wrong goal, because he wasn't obtaining justice. And then when the call was made by the prosecutor to not have the examination conducted based on the evidence, because see, somebody said, just like I said, like it seems like a connection could have been made between the subsequent
00:52:30
Speaker
crime that, you know, finally got that was actually perpetrated by Roscoe artists who was responsible for this murder, right? It seems like there's like, what would the point be in him calling and telling the lab, like, don't worry about making that comparison? So here's how that kind of went at the time, and then I'll kind of wrap this up with you. But I have some answers for like a couple of questions you asked. The first one was, this area had been overseen for a while to and was recognized as having like a lack of resources. So the SBI would jump on cases here really quickly. That's the SBI, the State Bureau of Investigation.
Aftermath and Compensation
00:53:12
Speaker
And if you go back and read through all of the court records,
00:53:16
Speaker
It became like an ouroboros of a problem here. So, Joel Locklear comes in and he and a guy named Leroy Allen, they're operating under a police chief at the time. Police chief's name is, I think it was Paul Canaday. So you've got Paul Canaday. No, you've got Paul Canaday. You've got a guy named Larry Floyd. The police chief was Lester Hagans. He had died the year before this exoneration happens.
00:53:46
Speaker
So they had put together this case. Now the problem was Leroy Allen, who is one of the cops here, and Joel Locklear, they had teamed up and they had been at, I think Allen had been like standing in on Sabrina's autopsy. So he had a ton of information and he wrote up the case with Joel Locklear, who was the detective that got them to sign these confessions.
00:54:15
Speaker
so When the SBI comes in, they just happen to have two idiots there. Primarily, they have a guy named Ken Sneed. He was an SBI agent. that like He's really there to offer additional assistance to what's happening. and He's supposed to work with Leroy Allen to sort it all out. and Allen never tells him.
00:54:39
Speaker
Look, man, we fed them everything. So Sneed, like even when this was going through in 2012 and 13 and 14 and like getting like press again, Ken Sneed from the SBI was swearing that Henry and Leon's confessions were true because they said things that only the person who committed the crime could have known.
00:55:02
Speaker
But they were given the information from the office. Yeah, so the liaison and the other detective had given them all the information. He had literally written their confession. That was one of the other things that like seemed to escape everyone. You don't go from block letters to a neatly written confession. like It's not a thing, in particularly in Leon's case.
00:55:22
Speaker
Right, but that wasn't, I mean, they said that they had written it in longhand, right? I mean, or was that... That was the detectives writing it. Right. That's what I mean. But like, was that disputed? It wasn't disputed. It just escaped it everybody that that's what they were looking at. Right. And to me, it seems like very strange that if you're going, I mean, I understand something being typed up, but if you're going to write it out,
00:55:47
Speaker
You know, it's odd. I would, um especially if you've got somebody that is not on a literacy level to write something yeah or read it, it seems to me like that would be your first red flag, right? Yeah, yeah, it should have been.
00:56:06
Speaker
And now obviously we know that like the initial suspect being Henry, then the implications that he made, no doubt due to what he was being told by the law enforcement officers that were interrogating him. um We know now that like, you know, once you start throwing in your friends, right? I mean, fortunately,
00:56:30
Speaker
those other guys didn't get ultimately implicated. It seems like there was a little bit of like, well, if they weren't involved, how come these two are still involved? But ultimately, this thing had flags all over it, right? Yeah, I think there was a piece of bad faith here by Joe Britt. I think Joe Britt canceling the fingerprints being compared with the SBI was a huge deal. it's It sort of comes out later. Do you want me to give you some of the aftermath stuff here?
00:57:01
Speaker
like like what's turn okay so They get out and they get the standard 45 bucks to get home after 31 years in prison. and At first, they weren't eligible for any kind of money in late 2000.
00:57:15
Speaker
14 because you have to have like pardons. So they were supported by the community and by like churches and charity money for about eight or nine months. That's Henry and Leah. So in June of 2015, Pat McCrory, who was the governor of North Carolina at the time, he formally pardons the two of them. He calls it the right thing to do. And then that pardon allows them to kind of go forward seeking compensation for wrongful imprisonment.
00:57:44
Speaker
And for the record, in 2015, when this happened, Joe Britt was still opposing the requests for a pardon and compensation and showing up like he was talking about two murderers, in spite of the fact that he knew someone else had done this. So August of 2015, they file a federal suit.
00:58:02
Speaker
And they request compensation for wrongful imprisonment. They seek damages against Robeson County, the sheriff's office down there. They list multiple agents of that department and multiple special investigators and agents from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation.
00:58:18
Speaker
They sue the State Bureau of Investigation. They end up suing, so that's the Leroy Allen-Kinsneed connection. They sue the town of Red Springs. They sue the estate of the Red Springs Police Chief, Lester Haggins. They sue all of the officers that were involved in like the initial investigation, including Paul Cannon and Larry Floyd.
00:58:39
Speaker
They ended up being awarded $750,000 on this first case. That's the maximum that was allowed for state compensation in the in the state part of it. Then they start to settle individually for some of the different, like it gets partitioned out because there's so many lawyers involved. By December 2017, three years have passed since they've been exonerated, two years since they've been pardoned, but they each get $500,000.
00:59:05
Speaker
Leon and Henry both get $500,000. They end up in 2021, there is a federal hearing to determine further compensation for them. And an attorney for the SBI, particularly for Leroy Allen and Ken Snead, he used his closing arguments to state that the men were guilty. He called them rapists and murderers, despite them having been exonerated. The judge shut him down, and he reminded the jury at the time that the argument that these brothers are rapists and murderers is inappropriate. So later in the day, in May of 2021, a federal jury ends up awarding Henry and Leon $75 million. dollars Each of them received $31 million, dollars which would have been one each for each year of their incarceration. And then they got $13 million dollars in punitive damages.
00:59:59
Speaker
So those damages were assessed against some of the
Political and Racial Implications
01:00:04
Speaker
SBI agents. But by this point in time, everybody's dying from this case. This case is 30 some years old. The Robeson County Sheriff's Office that day decided they were going to settle for $9 million. dollars The $75 million dollars award was the largest wrongful conviction award in US history.
01:00:20
Speaker
I think it was the largest personal injury case award in North Carolina history, if I'm remembering that correctly. The size of the award was really meant to send a message to the law enforcement involved. It does end up being reduced as it goes through the appellate process, but they do end up getting a chunk of money. I think it's still in the Fourth Circuit, maybe, that they're ah winding through things. I did know. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's still going through the appeals.
01:00:48
Speaker
They did get a chunk of it, but I think it's still going through the appeals process for to determine what the attorneys are. I read on the Marshall Project that Henry and Leon's status ended up making them prime targets for people who were trying to siphon off their compensatory money.
01:01:05
Speaker
to the point that like at some point between 2017 and 2021, a federal judge gets involved. They found that as a large amount of their money had been almost completely spent on predatory loans, excessive legal fees, cars, women's jewelry, and children's toys.
01:01:24
Speaker
When one of the sister gets in trouble, a lawyer gets in trouble, ah they were considered to be more susceptible to financial predation than most exonerees because of having the lower IQs. Paul McGarrow, he's one of the attorneys, and he was found to have taken advantage of Henry and Leon. He said he didn't do it.
01:01:45
Speaker
He said, I like these guys. They're nice people. Even if they're slow, it doesn't matter. But in March of 2021, the North Carolina Bar took him to task. And in a multi-day hearing, they found that Paul Magaro had lied to a judge. They put his own financial interest above his clients, and they suspended his law license until 2026. He was also ordered to repay, I think, $250,000 in state compensation money. Keep in mind, this is not the big settlement that we're talking about, the federal settlement. That don't that didn't come until 2021. This is the smaller settlements that were being misspent. And then there was there was a little bit more to all of this, where I noticed that one of them now has to have full-time care, and he's been confined to a psychiatric hospital several times.
01:02:26
Speaker
Last I heard he was living in a group home, but I don't know 100% that that's still the case. That would be weird to be a multimillionaire living in a group home. On the Wikipedia page, you could find an interesting article about the analysis and the aftermath talking about a New York Times and News and Observer, which is like ah that's a Raleigh, North Carolina paper, I think. They point out that the notoriety around Henry and Leon's cases had led to heavy and racialized politicization in the area. like Basically, they became targets of people running campaigns. and The North Carolina Republican Party at one point had used Henry's booking photo in campaign mailings meant to generate fear in locals, accusing like soft on crime. Do you know what I mean?
01:03:10
Speaker
They would pretty yeah put it on a campaign flyer and send it out. And they pointed to the Racial Justice Act, which is a huge deal, and it's going to come up a little later on for us. I think we're going to talk about it some. The Racial Justice Act had allowed North Carolina death row inmates to challenge death sentences that if they could prove that racism had been involved. Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, including Scalia,
01:03:34
Speaker
had used Henry's case not only to justify the death penalty, but to underscore the supposed prevalence of, quote, wild teen killers. In rejecting a request from Henry's attorneys to review his case, Scalia had described Henry's crime as so heinous that it made it it difficult to argue against lethal injection. And in a dissent, Justice Blackmun had noticed that his low IQ in the middle age of a nine-year-old, it would be unconstitutional for Henry to be put to doubt.
01:04:07
Speaker
Scalia also brings up Henry in a completely separate opinion, unrelated to this case, and cites Sabrina's murder as the type of crime that makes the death penalty necessary in the United States. And in 2015, which is a year after Henry is exonerated, Justice Breyer, he brings up Henry's case as an example of why the death penalty is unconstitutional. The North Carolina Center for Death Penalty Litigation wrote, Henry and Leon's case is not so much a lesson in how wrongful convictions are uncovered, as is a warning of how easily they can be missed entirely. If not for a single cigarette butt, Henry and Leon would likely have remained in prison for the rest of their lives, and Henry might have been executed.
01:04:50
Speaker
And for the record, Roscoe Artis, he died at a medium security facility in North Carolina during the pandemic, December 15th, 2020. I think he was 82 years old.
Conclusion and Call to Action
01:05:02
Speaker
It's a lot, right? It's so much, and it's so sad, all of it's sad. Well, they're home for the holidays now. Yeah, they are. They're home for the holidays now.
01:05:16
Speaker
Special consideration was given to True Crime XS by LabratiCreations dot.com. If you have a moment in your favorite app, please go on and give us a review or a five-star rating. It helps us get noticed in the crowd. This is True Crime XS.
01:07:23
Speaker
One day it will be my baby and me
01:08:16
Speaker
True Crime XS is brought to you by John and Meg. It's written produced, edited, and posted by John and Meg. You can always support True Crime Access through patreon.com or if you have a story you'd like them to cover, you can reach them at truecrimeaccess.com. Thank you for joining us.
01:08:46
Speaker
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