For death penalty supporters, the horrifying facts of the girl’s rape and murder only emphasized the justice of applying the ultimate penalty.

The rape and murder were horrible, indeed.

…Sabrina Buie, 11, who had been raped and suffocated with her underwear crammed down her throat, her body left in a soybean field.

Horrible.  Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown were outsiders to the small North Carolina community, having recently moved there from New Jersey.  They were 19 and 15, respectively, at the time, though McCollum had the mental age of a 9-year-old.  Both were mentally challenged.

No physical evidence tied Mr. McCollum or Mr. Brown, both African-American, as was the victim, to the crime. But a local teenager cast suspicion on Mr. McCollum.

So the police went out and got him.

After five hours of questioning with no lawyer present and with his mother weeping in the hallway, not allowed to see him, Mr. McCollum told a story of how he and three other youths attacked and killed the girl.

“I had never been under this much pressure, with a person hollering at me and threatening me,” Mr. McCollum said in a recent videotaped interview with The News & Observer. “I just made up a story and gave it to them so they would let me go home.”

After he signed a statement written in longhand by investigators, he asked, “Can I go home now?” according to an account by his defense lawyers.

The police then told 15-year-old Brown his brother confessed, and Brown did too. They recanted at trial and testified that their confessions were coerced, but that never happens.  The prosecutor believed they were guilty.

The two young defendants were prosecuted by Joe Freeman Britt, the 6-foot-6, Bible-quoting district attorney who was later profiled by “60 Minutes” as the country’s “deadliest D.A.” because he sought the death penalty so often.

Britt still thinks they are guilty, even though DNA evidence led to another man the police ignored.

Recent DNA testing by an independent state agency, the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, of evidence gathered in the initial investigation found a match for the DNA on the cigarette butt — not to either of the imprisoned men, but to Roscoe Artis, who lived only a block from where the victim’s body was found and who had a history of convictions for sexual assault.

Only weeks after the murder, in fact, Mr. Artis confessed to the rape and murder of an 18-year-old girl in Red Springs. Mr. Artis received a death sentence, later reduced to life, for that crime and remains in prison. Officials never explained why, despite the remarkable similarities in the crimes, they kept their focus on Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown even as the men proclaimed their innocence.

McCollum and Brown received all the due process the system could offer, right up to the Supreme Court.

In 1994, when the United States Supreme Court turned down a request to review the case, Justice Antonin Scalia described Mr. McCollum’s crime as so heinous that it would be hard to argue against lethal injection.

Yes, the crime was horrible.  The only problem was that Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown didn’t do it.  At 50 and 46 years of age, respectively, they are expected to walk off death row today, three decades later.  They were declared innocent by Robeson County Superior Court Judge Douglas B. Sasser based upon the DNA found on a cigarette at the murder scene and the Center for Death Penalty Litigation.  The new prosecutor announced that the state would not retry the defendants because the State “does not have a case.”

Ironically, three decades was not enough for North Carolina, which sent the brothers back to prison to complete the paperwork for their release, which would steal one last day of their lives.  They might be innocent men, who might be free to walk out of that courtroom and breathe air like free men do, but there was a clerk somewhere who demanded otherwise. The clerk always wins.

Was it the coerced confessions? Was it the police myopia of deciding who is guilty first and then manufacturing evidence? Was it their mental challenges that made them the perfect targets of manipulation?  Was it the heinousness that blinded everyone to the question of who committed the crime rather than that someone had to pay? Was it the deadliest prosecutor thumping a bible for the jury’s blind faith?  Was it the system that afforded the defendants review after review, but never risking the chance that these “killers” might not be guilty?

Or was it the DNA?  Because if there hadn’t been a cigarette butt, or if it hadn’t been collected as evidence, or if it hadn’t been preserved, and preserved all these years, or if it hadn’t been tested, then Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown would still be guilty as hell of this heinous rape and murder of a little girl, a crime “so heinous that it would be hard to argue against lethal injection.”

Horrible.

Update:  Jeff Gamso, who’s more knowledgeable about death cases than I will ever be, offers this view.