when you get off, you've got to get back on and do it again. on this episode of "death row stories" -- >> she was found in the middle of the field, raped and sodomized. >> a young girl is murdered in a rural southern town. >> this was the most horrific case that had ever occurred. >> and two teenaged brothers are sentenced to death. >> brown and his brother would sign written confessions to the crime. >> but when confessions are called into question -- >> how can you get my brothers to sign something when they can't even halfway read? >> and hidden evidence uncovered. >> we're going to come search for ourselves. >> executions hang in the balance. >> i didn't commit this crime, but they're going to kill me. >> there's a body in the water. >> he was butchered and murdered.

>> many people proclaim their innocence. >> in this case there are a number of things that stink. >> this man is remorseless. >> he needs to pay for it with his life. >> the electric chair flashed in front of my eyes. >> get a conviction at all costs. let the truth fall where it may. ♪ please take the stand and state your name. >> ronnie lee buie. >> and where do you live, mr. buie? >> red springs. >> and what happened the night of september 24th of 1983? >> i worked until about 12:00 that night, got home about 25 after 12:00. after i got there and looked all around, i realized sabrina wasn't home. that was really unusual.

>> ronnie buie, a textile worker and father of three, realized his 11-year-old daughter, sabrina, had gone missing. >> i went back out and went riding, looking around asking around different places, had anybody seen her. everywhere i would go, somebody would give a different account of where they last saw her at. i was worried now. we looked until about 5:00 that morning. then we laid down for a while. i got up at 8:00. my friend james shaw came by and went out into the woods. me and my wife was standing out there, and he came back and he said he had found her. my daughter, sabrina, in the soybean field. >> sabrina was found in the middle of the field just on the outskirts of red springs. she was naked. her clothing, her hair ribbon

that she had had on are found on the edge of the field. there are cigarette butts, beer cans, broken sticks with what appear to be blood on the ends of them. her body is taken to the state medical examiner's office. physically there's evidence that she's been raped. there's evidence she's been sodomized. then they start an internal examination to determine the cause of death, and they discover she has something stuck in her wind pipe. her underwear had been balled up and put on the end of a stick, and forcibly pushed down her throat, and the stick broke, and she suffocated. >> it was the most horrific case that had ever occurred, in my opinion. an 11-year-old girl. a case like that is something that you can't easily put out of your mind. >> the police start talking to people in the community, trying

to find out where she had been, who may have seen her. >> i received a radio call to report to red springs police department to assist in an investigation. we talked to family members and friends, kids that she went to school with. >> a young lady at a local high school starts talking about henry mccollum and saying, oh, she understood henry mccollum had ripped off someone in new jersey and that's why he was in red springs living with his family there. >> police arrived at the home of 19-year-old henry mccollum at 9:10 p.m. and asked him to come to the station for questioning. >> henry agreed to go. they informed him that he was not under arrest and advised him of his rights. >> he was not handcuffed. he was not belligerent. he cooperated with the officers, going into the room, and he was amicable to be interviewed. >> they went through a long

interrogation, and he agreed to make a statement, a statement that only a person who was there and participated in the attack could have known, about the panties, about the stick, about the rape. >> we were outside the room. it was very, very quiet and somber in there. >> agents went over each statement, and they did make corrections, and henry mccollum initialed everything that was corrected. >> during the interrogation henry also identified another participant, his stepbrother, leon brown. >> mccollum fully implicated leon brown in the rape and also stated leon helped hold sabrina down when the panties were stuffed down her throat. >> police questioned leon, and by sunrise both brothers were arrested for rape and murder. >> did you do it? >> no.

>> henry mccollum made a statement on camera. >> what happened? >> what happened? >> yeah. >> they raped and murdered. >> they what? >> they raped her and murdered. >> what did you do? >> i just hold her arms down, that's it. >> i just hold her arms, that was the way he phrased it. i hold her arms. >> henry mccollum and leon brown faced the death penalty. their case would be prosecuted by renowned district attorney joe freeman britt. >> joe freeman britt was a charismatic person, very authoritative. he had certain rules he expected prosecutors to follow, but the biggest rule was that you were there to prosecute criminals. >> you need to go after them and tear that jugular out. that's your job. that's what you're supposed to do. you're never going to be able to get at the truth by kissing an adverse witness on the cheek. the idea is that the courtroom

is like a crucible and you have to heat it up to boil the truth out of them. >> the trial began on october 15th, 1984. the prosecution's case was built around henry and leon's confessions, but britt also showed graphic crime scene photos to the jury and called to the stand henry's friend, l.p. sinclair. >> sinclair testified that mccollum had admitted to him that he had murdered and raped sabrina buie. >> it was an easy case to try. there was nothing there for the defense to counter. guilt wasn't a question in anybody's minds. the issue boiled down to what was going to happen to them. >> in britt's closing argument, he painted a devastating picture of the victim's suffering. >> he says, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it took five minutes for sabrina buie to suffocate on her underwear and that stick that was found in her throat.

>> i ask them to time with me five minutes, and i just sat down. i ask them to try to hold their breath as long as they could, and to think about the little girl in the woods, and how they sodomized her and raped her and kicked her and beat her and cursed her, all the time her begging for her mommy. >> there was a clock in the courtroom, and it had a second hand. so all you heard was the tick, tick, tick, tick. >> it was a long five minutes. >> after a two-week trial the jury found the brothers guilty and sentenced both henry and leon to death. the following day, the brothers were moved to the death row cell block in raleigh, north carolina. >> they escort us down the hallway, and i see a big round booth. you got a correction officer in there, open different doors for different inmates going in

different units. and you got inmates looking at you, say those them two guys killed that 11-year-old kid. how do you feel when another inmate call you a child killer and you are not that killer? ♪ it is such a good time to kiss ♪ ♪ it is such a good time to dance ♪ ♪ it is such a good time to [ laughing ] ♪ scoobidoo doobidoo ♪ scoobidoo doobidoo [ goose honking ] ♪ [ laughing ] a bad day on the road still beats a good one off it. ♪ progressive helps keep you out there.

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whetor surprise pizza,aco night, zantac works when you need it. it relieves or prevents heartburn in as little as 30 minutes, and lasts up to 12 hours. zantac. eat your way. treat your way.™ in october of 1984, brothers henry mccollum and leon brown arrived on death row. henry was 20, and leon just 16, the youngest person ever sentenced to death in north carolina's history. >> when we first came to north

carolina death row, the guards took the chains off of us and told us, take your dress clothes off. i'm standing there in my boxing shorts and he said, take those off. i said, man, you got to be kidding. he said, hey man, you got to do it or we're going to lock you up and throw you in the hole. and i said, a hole? now, this is where it's really embarrassing, when an officer tell you to bend over and spread your cheeks, and my little brother, not really understanding, he just freely took his clothes off. >> at the time of their incarceration henry's iq was in the mid 60s, leon just over 50, more than 30 points under the threshold for mental disability. >> i love my brother.

he's my baby brother. i worried about him. he was in his own little world. he'd go in his cell, he sits on his bed, have his radio playing, and he there rocking, rocking back and forth. he could stay like that all day long. >> despite their plight, henry and leon found a friend in fellow inmate sonny craig, who was paroled in 2012. >> when they come, they were nothing but children, nothing but kids, you know? they really didn't know where they were. they didn't know that they were sentenced to die and all they could tell me, i didn't do this, i ain't do this. why am i here? why? >> from the very first time i met henry mccollum i knew that he was intellectually disabled. >> marshall dayan represented henry during appeals. >> it's not that he couldn't communicate. he clearly could communicate. but he didn't really understand what i was saying. and i learned over time that i

had to explain things very, very simply. >> i met henry when he was probably 30 years old. developmentally, i would put him at somewhere like 10 or 11 years old. in the fifth grade, he was diagnosed as educably mentally retarded and he was moved to a special education school. henry was fearful. people used to tease him and scare him, tell him there were monsters in the house and he would be terrified. >> my impression was that this was not the kind of man who could have conceived of or initiated this kind of crime. >> henry and leon would languish on death row for eight years, but in 1988 the north carolina supreme court weighed in. >> henry mccollum and leon brown were awarded new trials, because the jury instructions at the original trial allowed the jury to convict both of them even if

the jury found that only one of them was guilty, and those instructions were illegal. >> while preparing for retrial, dayan realized that no physical evidence tied the brothers to the crime, and neither henry or leon were given lawyers during their interrogations. >> the police who interrogated henry mccollum got him to sign a waiver of his miranda rights. the language of the miranda warnings is written in an educational level beyond henry's ability to understand those words. henry mccollum thought waiving was going like this. he had no idea what he was giving up by signing that waiver. >> the more he learned about henry, the more dayan came to feel that henry's confession had been false and coerced by red springs police. >> when we got to red springs police station, he said where

was you september 24th on saturday night? i told him that i was home in the bed. he said, well, that's not what we heard. i said, what you mean? what you heard? who told you this? he told me none of my black business, right? and then they start pressuring me, accusing me of raping and murdering this girl. she was at the scene of the crime. you was the ring leader. i said, man, what is you talking about? i wasn't at no scene of the crime. >> but that was not satisfactory to the police. they continued to ask him questions. they said, we know that you participated in it. we have someone who can identify you. >> what do you all do when you all killed that little girl and she died on that ground and kept saying "mommy, mommy, mommy" what did you all do, drag her across that bean field? >> henry's mom, his sister and brother, leon brown, came to the police station because they were

so worried what was going on with henry. >> we can hear him hollering in the background i ain't kill nobody. we hear didn't you, didn't you, didn't you, didn't you. call him black nigger. i thought they were hitting him. >> it's like they were trying to force a confession out of me. i start feeling dizzy. >> so my mom started going to the door, let my son come out, let my son come out. they kept telling us shut the f up. she ran, only outside the door. but i went behind her to comfort her. and we stepped back in. she said where's leon? i said oh, god. and they had took leon back there. >> police took leon into a separate interrogation room. >> leon was a slow learning-minded person. i knew they could take advantage of people like that. >> the police said to henry, now, if you want to face the death penalty, you can continue not talking to us, but if you

tell us what happened then we will let you go. >> we're going to let you go home, right? and i'm happy now. i'm happy. i'm going home, right? if you could help us out and put your name down on these papers, they'd let me go home. i didn't care what i sign, i just wanted to get out of that room from around them. >> henry gets up and actually walks out of the room, and he's confronted by other police officers. they say where are you going? and he said, well, i've been told that i can leave. >> no, you ain't going nowhere. you are charged with first-degree murder and first-degree rape. >> even after he was arrested henry thought if he cooperated he could go home. >> did you do it? >> no. >> when the television reporter asks him, henry, what happened? he's just saying one of the

things that he had told to the police during the interrogation because he thought that's what he had to do to save his life. >> what did you do? >> i just hold her arm down, that's it. >> it was 6:00 in the morning, the police said i don't know why the f you all sitting here. your mother f is gone. both of them signed. i said signed what? how can you get my brothers to sign something when they can't even halfway read? they said they murdered that little girl and they f'ing gone so you can get your black -- out of here. that was it. we seen the news. i seen how they got in the van and they're gone. handcuffed together.

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that's how xfinity makes tv... simple. easy. awesome. by 1991, henry mccollum and leon brown were facing separate retrials for the murder of sabrina buie. henry's lawyer, marshall dayan, argued that police exploited henry's mental disabilities to solicit a false confession. the judge disagreed. dayan was now faced with a difficult decision. >> in the absence of any evidence to point to another suspect, my best legal advice was, henry, we cannot put on a defense that you didn't do it. the best strategy is to try and argue a diminished capacity defense, get you convicted of something less than first-degree

murder and get you sentenced to life, not death. >> i said, man, you got to be crazy. you not really trying to fight my case and prove my innocence. is you out of your mind? he said, man, it's better than death. >> henry finally agreed to dayan's strategy, but it didn't change the outcome. the jury once again found henry guilty and sentenced him to death. >> i think the jurors ultimately concluded that the crime was so horrible that if the death sentence was ever going to be used it had to be used in a case like this. >> when i was sentenced to death the second time, i knew it was going to happen because they didn't really take they time and study that case and go out and find who done it. i knew me and my brother was through, that we were never going back home to our parents.

>> henry's brother, leon, had confessed to the rape of sabrina buie but not to the murder and his attorney believed leon's retrial presented a real chance for him to go free, based on time served. >> the state had indicated that they would accept a plea to second-degree rape, which was a significantly less serious sentence, but leon had no interest in that. we explained the risk he was taking and the benefit for pleading, and he was absolutely adamant he would not plead to something he had not done. >> facing the choice of walking away from prison or fighting for his innocence, leon chose to fight. >> whenever a defendant turns down what i as the defense lawyer view as a really good plea offer i think to myself, do they really understand the risk? do they know what happened? i knew he had serious intellectual disabilities. >> leon's retrial lasted only

two days. he was convicted of first-degree rape and sentenced to life in a separate prison, 60 miles away from henry. >> after leon had got shipped to another prison, henry was suffering. he would really feel down and bad and out. >> it wasn't easy. it wasn't easy at all. i thought about my little brother. something bad could happen to him. he's separated from his own brother. i thought i might never see my brother no more. >> henry found support from another death row inmate, roscoe artis. >> i was with roscoe for a long time. we became friends in the robeson county jail, and he tell me, you and your brother ain't have nothing to do with that crime. >> he would tell me just about every day, them boys is not guilty. >> in some ways, he had a good heart, and i began to look up to him like a father. >> people don't understand, we

had love on death row. we actually was a family, and it's not only for brothers in prison, like leon and henry. if you stay with a person for 20 years, 15, 10 years, you're going to get very close. >> i done lost 42 friends to their death. every time they have an execution i go off, i go off, because i don't like what they doing to the people that i love, that i came close to as family and stuff, and they taking them away from me. they taking them one by one. >> and then the next time you see that guy, you looking out your window, you see him coming out there on the gurney with a sheet over it. i've stood at that window and cried on many nights. guys i actually love, that make you think, when's my time? >> i felt hopeless.

i felt like there was no point to go on. i had saved up a lot of different kind of medications i had took in prison. i saved them up in maalox bottles and stuff. i drunk all ten bottles. they found me on the floor. they put some kind of shot in me, then they put me in a room on a cold concrete floor, which is a suicide watch. i was heartbroke. i asked god, just take me, take me out of this world. >> henry's brother, leon, now in the cumberland county prison, was also struggling to survive. >> what happened to leon when he was put in general population?

>> whew. i'm going to say no comment. my sister could tell you more about that. >> when i went to visit leon, when they brung him out he was walking like a zombie to me. so i grabbed him and hugged him. and i said, leon, what's wrong? he said, nothing. i said why you walking like that then? he said i got to tell you, i got to tell you, i got to tell you. he said, i was raped. i said you was raped in there? >> leon had been abused. them guys got a hold to him, my understanding they had sex with him, and i think that kind of kind of ticked him, you know, kind of messed him up. >> he just never been right since, never. >> after henry and leon's retrials, years passed before a ray of hope finally arrived in the form of attorney ken rose, from the center for death penalty litigation.

>> from the very beginning, the confessions of henry mccollum and leon brown were suspect. the police wrote the confessions, but also, there wasn't a single piece of physical evidence that put henry mccollum and leon brown at the crime scene. >> rose learned that there was evidence that could be tested with newly available dna technology. >> there was evidence from a cigarette butt. the significance of that is it was the state's theory that whoever committed this crime had smoked that cigarette. so we sent that to a dna company. >> the results would open a new door for leon and henry. ♪ whooh!

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in 2005, defense attorney ken rose submitted a cigarette butt found at sabrina buie's crime scene for dna testing. >> this biological evidence could identify the killer of sabrina buie. they tested it and found that henry mccollum's dna was not on that cigarette butt. >> while the dna results did not match leon or henry, this new evidence alone would not exonerate the brothers. >> the most frustrating part for us was that it wasn't enough to show that this was not their dna on that cigarette butt.

>> you going to come in here and tell me my dna come back negative. why you ain't just let me go home? >> ken rose knew the only answer would be to find a positive dna match to another suspect. >> i wrote a letter to the new district attorney johnson britt and said, let's submit this result to codis, which is the database of every person convicted of a felony, and let's see if there's some match. >> our lab in raleigh told us that sample was too small for them to conduct any type of testing. unfortunately, dna testing in 2005 was basic compared to the type of testing we have today. >> five years would pass, until in 2010 a new development would rock the death penalty community.

>> greg taylor appealed to the innocence inquiry commission and is now the first person in our state to be exonerated by a three-judge panel. >> north carolina's innocence inquiry commission charged with looking into wrongful convictions is the only state-run organization of its kind. >> after 17 years greg taylor is a free man. for the first time in north carolina's history, a three-judge panel has vacated a murder conviction after it was referred to them by the state's innocence inquiry commission. >> when leon brown heard of this new exoneration, he called his sister, geraldine. >> leon gave me a piece of paper, says sister, listen, reach out to these people here. and i said who is that? he said the innocence inquiry. he said please, sister, call them. >> sharon stellato was the commission's lead investigator. >> the appellate courts are not actually designed to hear innocence claims at all, but the innocence inquiry commission can

introduce any new credible, verifiable evidence of innocence to be re-examined. >> stellato would immediately find holes in the state's case. >> there is no physical evidence that links henry mccollum and leon brown to this crime. the confessions were inconsistent. they did not match each other. they did not match the evidence located in the crime scene. >> leon never mentioned beer cans, never mentioned a cigarette, never mentioned a lot of the details of the crime scene that henry mentioned. >> a knife was used, and the victim had been stabbed. the victim didn't have any stab marks on her at all. >> henry said the body was dragged along the field. leon said the body was carried. >> henry mccollum had stated that her underwear was pink when actually her underwear was white. >> stellato also learned that legendary d.a., joe freeman britt, called the deadliest prosecutor in america, had hidden evidence from the defense.

>> a confidential informant, a 17-year-old girl named ethel later recanted knowing anything about the crime and just said that she gave henry mccollum's name because he seemed like someone strange in the neighborhood. >> ethel furman, she said i don't think he was involved. i just think he's funny looking and he's from here and i have no reason to think that he was involved in this crime. and joe freeman britt withheld it from the defense team, that she recanted her earlier statement. >> the defense also learned that britt knew the star witness against henry and leon, l.p. sinclair, was lying. >> before the trial they gave a polygraph examination to l.p. sinclair, and that polygraph showed that mr. sinclair knew nothing about the murder of sabrina buie, and yet joe freeman britt put l.p. sinclair on the stand. so he knew that he was putting false testimony on at that first trial. britt was well-known for his

misconduct in about a third of his cases. there was acknowledgment of prosecutorial misconduct. the appellate courts had repeatedly admonished him. >> sharon stellato also suspected that britt had withheld key physical evidence from the defense. >> we had requested evidence numerous times from the red springs police department and we had been told that they didn't have it, but we knew from past records that couldn't be accurate. so we decided we're just going to go to red springs police department. we told them we're going to need you to search again or we're going to come in and search for the documents ourselves. so they went back. and it took about 30 to 45 minutes, and he came back and he had a banker's box. it was all of the missing physical evidence. >> stellato discovered that police had initially been pursuing a different suspect in the case, someone who henry and leon knew and had come to trust.

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investigator sharon stellato discovered that before henry and

leon's trial, police had requested that fingerprints from a beer can found at the crime scene be tested for a match to a known felon living in the area. >> that was extremely significant because someone from law enforcement made a connection that this particular person must have been a suspect in the sabrina buie murder. next to this guy's name there was an s, s for suspect. >> that suspect was none other than roscoe artis, who had taken henry and leon under his wing on death row. >> roscoe artis had committed a very similar murder in the same small town in a very similar manner. that was the murder of joanne brockman. >> about four weeks after sabrina buie was discovered, joanne brockman was found raped and murdered in red springs, less than a mile from where sabrina buie was killed. you had some of the same investigators in the mccollum/brown case that were

involved in the artis case and they didn't make the connections. >> the police knew about this other suspect, but they did not carry out that fingerprint comparison, and the question is, why? >> the request to cancel the fingerprint comparison was made after trial, so after henry mccollum and leon brown were convicted. >> the fingerprint had sat in evidence for nearly 30 years, and stellato discovered that it was too degraded to test. however, the cigarette butt found at the murder scene could be used for testing. >> then we went back, and we pulled the extracts from the testing that had been done previously. and we go back to them and we say, are you sure you can't test now and it's 2014? and they say, let us look at it again. and it ends up getting a hit. >> i get a phone call on friday afternoon. sharon stellato says are you familiar with the name roscoe artis?

i mean, i just paused. i said, yeah, i know who roscoe artis is. he's serving a life sentence for rape and murder of a teenaged girl in red springs, north carolina. she said, well, our dna, our codis hit is for roscoe artis. i was like, holy [ muted ]. >> roscoe used to come over to my cell every day and sit there and talk to me for hours, for hours. he said, i knew they didn't do it. i said, roscoe, how you know? he said, i know. and when i questioned and questioned him, he got mad with me and explode. and then roscoe began to describe to me about the little girl's panties, this child's panties, how she was talking to him hollering. i knew he did it, from the way he was talking. i prayed about this thing. i said now should i tell the lawyers? >> we were contacted by sonny

craig, and mr. craig said roscoe artis had given him details about the crime that sonny felt only the person who had committed it would know. in sonny's opinion roscoe was telling him in so many words that he was the perpetrator. >> ken and i went to see henry to tell him about the new evidence, and we sat in the biggest booth in the visiting area at central prison. henry behind the plexiglass and bars on the other side. ken told henry that they had run the dna on the cigarette butt and that it had matched someone and that person was roscoe artis. >> i said, no. i don't believe that. he said yes. he said it's the truth. i said no, i don't believe that. the next day, eating at the diner hall, i heard two other death row inmates talking about it.

i said, how do you all, how do you all know about this, right? he said, man, my attorney told me this. he said are you henry mccollum? i said, yeah, that's me. he hugged me and everything, man. he said i believe you getting ready to go home. i said so they really are telling the truth. ♪ t-mobile believes, it's better to give than to receive. some may disagree.

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>> henry and leon's new trial began on september 2nd, 2014. the brothers had spent more than three decades behind bars and had been separated for years. >> 2010, that was the last time i seen my little brother. i didn't see my brother until 2014 until that day. i wanted to hug him, but they had me chained down. >> the courtroom was packed. they had shut people out. they couldn't fit any more people in. >> sharon stellato would be the only witness called. >> can you explain the process of obtaining dna from roscoe artis? >> sure. after the -- i was on the stand for most of the day. and then johnson britt stood up

and presented the closing statement. >> the state does not have the case to prosecute against mr. mccollum and brown. i said that based on the strength of that evidence if the judge was to order a new trial, i would elect not to retry the cases because the dna evidence negates the confessions. >> the court vacates the convictions of mr. mccollum and mr. brown. >> the judge overturned the conviction and sentence and the judge ordered mr. mccollum and mr. brown to be immediately released. >> this really happened? i'm really getting ready to go home? >> i was stunned. i heard a lot of people screaming. praising god that this day finally came. then i heard the victim's sister. >> it was such an exciting moment for the defense attorneys and for the courtroom and, of course, for leon brown and henry

mccollum, but the victim's family, they cried out. and they -- they cried. you could hear her mom and her sister. that was so hard. i went to the victim's family, and they were devastated. >> i asked the guard next to me would they let me go to them? i wanted to tell both of them i didn't do that to your daughter. and i don't want you to hold that grudge in your heart. that little 11-year-old child, she never got a chance to grow up. she could have been anything.

and then this sick monster come down the road and snatch it all away from her. i wanted to hug her mom, tell her to be strong, but they wouldn't let me go in there. >> 50-year-old henry mccollum will have many things to learn after spending 30 years behind bars. >> on the inside, i was happy. i was happy. but why they wait this long? why did they wait all these years? >> henry moved in with his sister, geraldine. leon never recovered. his mental illness grew worse, and he was eventually placed in a state-run group home where he

receives 24-hour care as a ward of the state. >> leon is very sick. jail has done some real damage to leon. real, real damage. sometime he cries "mama," and, you know, she's not here. henry's happy. he's happy. i smile sometimes just to be doing it because i have to let him know i'm happy, but on the other side of me, it's really hurting bad. people may think, you know, she's happy. i am, and then the other side of my heart that belongs to leon is, like, dead. real dead. >> many people simply look at a prosecutor as a person who's supposed to convict people and send them to prison, but in the end, my job is to seek justice. i can strike hard blows, but i can't strike foul blows. i've seen a prosecutor in action

who delivered a lot of foul blows. and that was joe freeman britt. >> within the brass of every one of us burns a flame that constantly whispers in our ear, preserve human life at any cost. it is the prosecutor's job to extinguish that flame in the breast of every one of those jurors. >> joe freeman britt was never held accountable for his misconduct. he died in april of 2016. >> there had been at least eight cases in north carolina alone where people have been on death row and exonerated. and for me, for his attorney who was not sure he was innocent, for 20 years until 2014, it makes me realize how much we have to lose by continuing to risk killing innocent people. it was a sobering lesson for me. what are we willing to risk as a

society? and i think that even supporters of death penalty looking at henry mccollum and leon brown's cases have to conclude that this is not worth the risk. >> money's good to have, but it will never make up from 30 years that was stole from me. at least they could have told me sorry that you picked me and my brother out of everybody because that looks suspicious and you knew you could run over them. the same month you locked us up, another innocent woman got her life taken. that ain't the way law is supposed to be. they're supposed to be out here protecting innocent citizens. instead, they're doing dirt.

on this episode of "death row stories" -- >> they found her body just off a dirt road. >> a 19-year-old is abducted on her way to work. >> she was strangled, raped. >> there was in fact the presence of semen. >> and dna results lead to a death sentence. >> you deserve what the state of texas will be doing to you. >> but when evidence points to someone closer to home -- >> you're failing a polygraph, this is your fiance. did you kill her? >> the state had dna evidence that puts police officers at the crime scene? >> this was something well thought out and staged. >> the state was executing me, they'd made murderers out of themselves. >> there's a body in the water. >> he was butchered and murdered. >> many people proclaim their innocence.