Posted on 09/06/2014 5:36:11 AM PDT by exhaustguy
Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, two men who have sat on North Carolina's death row for three decades for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl, were set free this week after the discovery of new DNA evidence.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
Confessing to a murder you didn’t commit seems like it could cause you some trouble.
DNA cannot prove innocence, it can only prove guilt.These men who admitted doing it could have still done it, but just did not leave DNA behind, same as not leaving finger prints.
They didn’t necessarily confess, but police question can leave a person so confused that it can seem like they did.
It’s why you don’t ever go to the police station to answer a couple of questions without your lawyer.
Yeah. on the other hand i’d like to have seen the ‘interviews’ that solicited the confessions. Read the article and theres no doubt that other guy did it.
It was there all along. bother to read the article?
“DNA cannot prove innocence, it can only prove guilt.These men who admitted doing it could have still done it, but just did not leave DNA behind, same as not leaving finger prints.”
It’s pretty hard not to leave DNA behind; even a handshake exchanges DNA. Moreover, the absence of your DNA, and the presence of someone else’s DNA, tends to point rather firmly in the direction of their guilt, and not yours.
In most state’s, with death penalty cases, evidence is kept until the sentence is carried out, just in case.
Disgusting. The prosecutor ought to be disbarred. It is fundamental to our system of criminal justice that a person cannot be convicted on the basis of a confession alone. I hope those who coerced the confessions are burning in hell. And I demand God explain why these men had to sit in prison wrongfully for so long.
You might want to read about the circumstances in which they admitted doing it. They were 15 and 19 years old at the time, and were questioned for several hours without an attorney present. You have one of two possibilites - either they offered detailed confessions regarding the crime scene because they were there and very observant even given their mental capabilities or the facts were fed to them by the officers. The only evidence ever presented against them was the confessions which they quickly recanted after getting legal representation. The confessions themselves implicated two other individuals with rock solid alibis. Absolutely no physical evidence was found to link the two to the crime. A fingerprint was available at the time was never analyzed that later was tied to the admitted killer. The DNA also linked the killer (who a few weeks later raped and killed another in the same fashion). Check out http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1281161/mccollum-brown-memo.pdf
i want to thank you for that reply. well put.
the crime itself certainly calls for it. too bad they got the wrong guys.
Unfortunately the US system of justice incentivizes police to close cases and prosecutors to obtain convictions. That’s how officers become detectives and how prosecutors become politicians or judges.
The idea to ensure they have the right guy is secondary.
NO EVIDENCE can be kept from the defense.
Don't capital case defendants get high-priced legal representation? If so, the defense really dropped the ball.
Poor black teens getting the very best?
Moral of the story. Do not sit down for talks with the police. Everthing you say will be used against you. Nothing you say will be used for you. They have lawyers all over the place. Use them.
The one point too many people overlook. Its not about justice, it’s about winning.Thats why you have cases where people are cleared and DA’s retry them anyway because the wrongful conviction is a black mark on their record.
With the new capabilities of DNA testing, they have been going back to cold cases and solved cases from many years ago and testing any evidence that was saved.
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