Two Black half brothers, both intellectually disabled, were awarded a combined $75 million for being imprisoned for 30 years after they were wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in 1983, the Associated Press reported.
Henry McCollum and Leon Brown received $31 million in compensatory damages, one million each for each year spent in prison, and $13 million in punitive damages. The pair, who were 19 and 15 at the time of the murder, had been sentenced to death upon their conviction which, their attorneys argued, was based on exonerating evidence suppressed by law enforcement.
The pair were released from prison in 2014 when DNA evidence cleared them and indicated another man, already a convicted murderer, committed the crime.
“The first jury to hear all of the evidence — including the wrongly suppressed evidence — found Henry and Leon to be innocent, found them to have been demonstrably and excruciatingly wronged, and has done what the law can do to make it right at this late date,” Raleigh attorney Elliot Abrams, who represented the pair, said after the trial.