As 2 Go Free, a Dogged Ex-Prosecutor Digs In
LUMBERTON,
N.C. — The most memorable moment of the trial that put Henry McCollum
and Leon Brown behind bars for three decades for a hideous 1983 rape and
murder was a display of brilliant courtroom theatrics.
District
Attorney Joe Freeman Britt of Robeson County, who stood 6-foot-6 and
came to be known as America’s “Deadliest D.A.,” asked jurors to try to
hold their breath for five minutes — the time it took the 11-year-old
victim to choke to death, after her killer stuffed her panties down her
throat with a stick — to get a small sense of the horror she
experienced.
The jury came back with two of the more than 40 death penalty convictions Mr. Britt won over almost two decades.
Those
two convictions — obtained on the basis of inconsistent, soon recanted,
confessions from two mentally impaired teenagers who said they had been
coerced to sign statements written by interrogators, and testimony from
an informer who previously did not implicate the two young men — were
overturned last week. Mr. McCollum and Mr. Brown were exonerated and set
free.
Their
release concluded a judicial horror story in which the two men were
sent to death row though no physical evidence linked them to the murder,
while a serial sex offender who lived less than 100 yards from the
crime scene — and who, a few weeks after that murder, would kill a
teenage girl nearby in strikingly similar circumstances — was never
pursued as a suspect.
But
if the case was finally closed, the episode reopened ugly memories of
what critics say was a merciless criminal justice system that ran
roughshod over helpless people for decades in this poor, sprawling,
racially volatile county sometime known as the Great State of Robeson.
At
the heart of that is the legacy of Joe Freeman Britt, who earned a spot
in “Guinness World Records” and a “60 Minutes” profile for his prowess
in sending people to death row. (Only two were eventually executed. The
most infamous was Velma Barfield, 52, who died from lethal injection in
1984 for killing her fiancé by poisoning his beer.)
And
whereas Mr. Britt, now 79 and retired, once dominated this county and
won headlines for convictions, now some on both sides of the courtroom
see a different tale.
The
current district attorney, Johnson Britt, whose grandfather was first
cousin to Joe Freeman Britt’s father, suggested that his predecessor
could be tyrannical.
“He
is a bully, and that’s the way he ran this office,” he said. “People
were afraid of him. Lawyers were afraid of him. They were intimidated by
his tactics. And he didn’t mind doing it that way.” He added: “You
treat people with dignity, and you can get a whole lot more done that
way than you can by trying to run over people. And that’s part of his
legacy, that he ran over people.”
In a subsequent interview, Joe Freeman Britt made it clear that Johnson Britt was not his kind of prosecutor, either.
“Well,
let’s say, if I was a bully, he is a pussy. How about that?” the elder
Mr. Britt said...
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