In 1983, an 11-year-old North Carolina girl was raped and suffocated, her body later found
in a soybean field.
Two mentally disabled half-brothers, Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, quickly became targets
of the investigation.
After hours of interrogation, McCollum and Brown each confessed.
They were convicted and sentenced to die.
Sounds like well-served justice.
Public officials in North Carolina and across the country praised their death penalty conviction.
But here's the problem: McCullom and Brown were innocent.
After 30 years on death row, DNA evidence revealed another man, who'd lived near the
scene and had a long record of sexual assaults, was the murderer.
He was never investigated during the case.
We nearly executed two men for a crime they did not commit.
That shows just how dangerous the death penalty really is.
Even if you think that some people deserve to die, governments make mistakes.
That means having to accept the unacceptable: innocent people will die.
That can't be undone and we cannot compensate for it the way we can with mistaken imprisonment.
What if the death penalty doesn't make us any safer?
It hasn't deterred crime more than life sentence without parole, nor have we seen a spike in
murder rates following its abolishment in different states.
Innocent people can and have been wrongfully sentence to die for many reasons.
Take Curtis McCarty.
He was sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer's daughter.
After 22 years in prison he was exonerated.
He returned home to his terminally ill mother and now adult son, and a granddaughter he'd
never held.
22 years of Curtis McCarty's life were stolen from him because a forensic chemist with the
Oklahoma City Police Department either intentionally altered or lost evidence related to the case.
That same chemist participated in over 3,000 other cases; 23 resulted in death sentences.
Does that make you feel safe?
How many more innocent people should we let die before we abolish the death penalty once
and for all?