RALEIGH — A lawsuit by Henry McCollum and Leon Brown says Robeson County, the town of Red Springs, and several law enforcement officers, including Sheriff Kenneth Sealey, deprived them of their constitutional rights and caused them emotional damage when they were wrongfully convicted of raping and strangling an 11-year-old Red Springs girl.
The 37-page civil rights lawsuit was filed in federal court Monday by attorney Patrick Megaro, who has been representing the half-brothers as they sought compensation from the state for the more than three decades they spent in prison before being released in September 2014.
It names as defendants Robeson County, the town of Red Springs, Sealey, Leroy Allen, Kenneth Snead, Garth Locklear, Larry Floyd and the late Red Springs Police Chief Luther Haggins. At the time of McCollum and Brown’s arrests in 1983, Sealey and Floyd worked with the Red Springs Police Department. Locklear worked for the Robeson County Sheriff’s Office and Snead and Allen with the State Bureau of Investigation.
The suit asks for a declaratory judgment finding that the defendants violated McCollum and Brown’s civil rights; compensation and punitive damages for the deprivation of their rights; and compensation for attorneys’ fees and other costs associated with the suit.
Patrick Pait, attorney for the county, said he could not comment on the lawsuit. Sealey also declined to comment.
McCollum was the state’s longest serving death row inmate when an evidentiary hearing in September showed that no evidence tied either man to Sabrina Buie’s death and a judge vacated their convictions. Brown had been serving a life sentence for rape; the murder charge against him was dropped during a retrial.
Like the motion for relief that prompted McCollum and Brown’s release from prison last year, the lawsuit said the brothers — who were 15 and 19 at the time and intellectually disabled — has been coerced into signing the false confessions that became the basis of the state’s case against them.
The men were taken into police custody after a high school student told Locklear and Sealey she had heard they were involved in Buie’s death. The lawsuit claims law enforcement never disclosed that the girl had no personal knowledge of the crime.
During a four-and-a-half hour interrogation, the suit says, Allen, Snead and Sealey accused McCollum of participating in the rape and murder, “verbally threatening him when he proclaimed his innocence.” According to the suit, McCollum was not read his Miranda rights, allowed to speak with an attorney, or make any phone calls.
“Whenever he tried to remain silent,” the suits says, “he was verbally and physically threatened by Defendant Kenneth Snead and Defendant Kenneth Sealey.”
The suit says Snead and Sealey told McCollum that witnesses and forensic evidence implicated him in the crimes.
“These were lies. In fact, no physical evidence or independent witnesses existed linking either Plaintiff to the scene of the crime or to the crime itself,” the suit says. When they were questioned, McCollum and Brown had been excluded as matches for fingerprints found at the scene of Buie’s murder.
Evidence presented at the September 2014 hearing instead implicated Roscoe Artis, who lived next to the field where Buie’s body was found and who is currently serving a life sentence for a similar crime that occurred in Red Springs about one month after Buie’s death.
The suit also says that law enforcement never disclosed a request to compare fingerprints found at the scene with those of Artis and L.P. Sinclair, who was interviewed shortly after Buie’s death and became a main witness for the state despite giving contradictory statements to law enforcement and saying he had no knowledge of the crime, which was confirmed by polygraph.
Haggins, Snead and Floyd requested the fingerprint analysis just days before McCollum and Brown’s trials, listing both Sinclair and Artis as suspects in the crime. The fingerprint comparison was never completed and was not disclosed to the District Attorney’s Office, the court or McCollum and Brown’s lawyers, the suit says.
“The fact that suspect Roscoe Artis was not further investigated … indicates that Defendants Robeson County and Town of Red Springs, failed to adequately implement training, supervision, and/or discipline to prevent these types of reckless oversights,” the suit says.
The suit says the county and Red Springs “continue to implement customs, usages, practices, procedures, policies, and rules that permit police officers to engage in the practice of withholding exculpatory evidence,” citing the Red Springs Police Department’s failure to turn over a box of evidence related to the case for three years.
The amount of damages owed to McCollum and Brown would be determined by the court.
According to the suit, McCollum and Brown “suffered embarrassment, mental anguish, humiliation, severe psychological stress, and psychological injuries, as well as damage to their physical health” while incarcerated. They watched more than 40 of the friends they had made in prison be led to executions; were bullied because of their disabilities; missed out on life opportunities; developed lasting physical and mental health problems; and were unable to attend their mother’s funeral, the suit says.
McCollum and Brown were pardoned by Gov. Pat McCrory in June and were told on Wednesday that they would be receiving the full amount of compensation they are entitled to under state law — $750,000 each — for their wrongful imprisonment.
