Brothers Henry McCollum and Leon Brown did 30 years for a crime they didn’t commit. They never stood a chance.

McCollum and Brown’s limitations have been central to their story since their arrest in 1983 for the brutal rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl.

Agents for the State Bureau of Investigation and officers from the Town of Red Springs elicited detailed confessions from the brothers after hours of interrogation. They were teenagers at the time, living in a small town in Robeson County.

In 2014, a judge freed McCollum and Brown after DNA evidence led investigators to the real killer, a man police had originally considered a suspect in 1984.

It wasn’t just that the crime was horrific, or that they were black. They lacked the capacity to put up a fight.

Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, whose low IQs limit their ability to read and write, spent 30 years in prison for another man’s crime.

There are some recurrent themes in criminal law, that people with intellectual deficits and mental illness are vulnerable to wrongful convictions because they are severely limited in assisting in their own defense. And are very likely to be blamed for crimes because they are easy targets. Of course the stupid guy, the crazy guy, did it. They’re criminals, those types.

But after 30 years, they’re free and now the fight is on for compensation. And the vultures are hovering over their undead carcasses, waiting to sate their appetite.

The N&O reported last month that two out-of-state consultants and attorneys for the brothers are in a dispute over their claims on payouts to the brothers.

The consultants, women who bill themselves as activists, said they may sue to recoup the portion of the brothers’ civil payouts that they negotiated in a contract signed just months after their release. Deborah Pointer and Kimberly Weekes said they are due 1 percent of the brothers’ civil awards for the time they spent publicizing their case and pressuring the governor to pardon McCollum and Brown.

Activists. Fighting for truth, justice and one percent of the loot. Hey, even activists have to eat, right? They’ve already gotten $10,000 apiece for their efforts, but they made a deal and don’t they deserve their share of the compensation for the 30 years the brothers spent behind bars for someone else’s crime?

hey say they are owed a $75,000 cut of the $1.5 million the state paid the men in July 2015. In a press release posted online this week, Pointer and Weekes reiterated their assertion that they are owed more money for their work.

“Right now our focus is on getting paid,” Pointer and Weekes said. “We want the brothers and their lawyers to do the right thing and pay us what we are owed, nothing else.”

Weird how the “right thing” can be used for whatever purpose an activist chooses. Like “justice,” its just a word, and anybody can claim it’s theirs, together with their $75,000 cut of the compensation.