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Alexei Navalny is dead.  The international justice crusader was murdered in a rugged Russian Arctic penal colony either on the direct orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin or with his official blessing. His murder was timed to coincide with the Munich Security Conference where his wife, Yulia, was attending to reinforce her husband’s campaign for justice in Putin’s corrupt Russia.

Alexei Navalny’s memory will not die, forgotten amongst the other skeletons in Putin’s dark political closet.

But this article is not about Alexei Navalny, but rather about the tragic saga of two American Black men, Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, who were brutalized for more than three decades by the American criminal justice system.

Kenneth Snead was 75 years of age when he died on January 11, 2019 in Wilmington, North Carolina. He spent 34 of those 75 years in law enforcement, a significant number of which were spent as an agent with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI).

On September 24, 1983, 11-year-old Sabrina Buie went missing in Red Springs, North Carolina, a rural community in the northern part of Robeson County. Her raped and murdered body was found in a local soybean field near a convenience store. The Red Springs Police Department and the SBI worked the investigation together. The SBI assigned the investigation to Snead and Leroy Allen while the Red Springs Police Department assigned Detectives Joel Garth Locklear and Kenneth Sealey to simultaneously work the case.

On September 27, 1983, Detective Locklear, while canvassing the area for possible witnesses, spoke to Henry McCollum. The following evening Agent Snead and Detective Sealy spoke to a white high school girl named Ethel Furmage who told the investigators that she had “heard at school” that McCollum “had something to do with” Buie’s murder—a statement the girl later recanted.

That white girl’s rumor was enough for Snead and Sealey to pick up McCollum and escort him to the local police station where he was fingerprinted and booked. The young Black man, who had the mind of a 9-year-old child and an IQ of 56, was then subjected to a four-hour interrogation during which he was badgered, yelled and cursed at, and endured a litany of racial slurs.

Under the threat that he would be sent to the gas chambers if he did not admit to the Buie rape and murder, McCollum confessed with the details provided to him by Snead and Sealey.

He then asked Snead, “Can I go home now?”

The details of McCollum’s coerced confession implicated not only his half brother, Leon, but three friends as well.

Red Springs Police Chief Luther Haggins and Detective Locklear then hauled Leon, who had an IQ in the mid-50s, into another interrogation room where he gave a coerced confession that conflicted with Henry’s confession.

It took these two cops just a half-hour to browbeat the 15-year-old Brown into confessing.

An ensuing investigation determined that the three friends implicated by McCollum could not have possibly been involved in the crime.

Based on those two patently coerced false confessions, the teenaged half-brothers were convicted and sentenced to death in October 1984.

They were tried together. Attorneys for both teenagers moved to have the coerced confessions suppressed. Those motions were denied. The two half-brothers both testified at the trial and repudiated their coerced false confessions.

Four years later the North Carolina Supreme Court reversed their convictions and ordered separate retrials. That ruling was based on erroneous jury instructions given at the first trial of the two teenagers.

The half brothers were then retried in adjacent counties—McCollum in Cumberland County in November 1991 where he was convicted and resentenced to death; and Brown in Bladen County in June 1992 where he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. The false confessions were once again used to secure convictions against the two mentally challenged young men.

During his nearly two decades on death row, McCollum witnessed 42 people being led off death row to be executed—one of who was a close friend.

After seeing the friend’s body carted away, McCollum experienced a “nervous breakdown.”

McCollum’s case in particular became so notorious that in 2014 the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia cited its brutality as a basis for having the death penalty as did the North Carolina legislature in 2010.

The systemic racism in the American criminal justice system is so rioted that an acclaimed justice of the U.S. Supreme Court would target a man with the mind of a 9-year-old child as a social and legal basis to have the death penalty.

In 2009, Leon Brown took it upon himself to write a letter to the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission (“NCIIC”) asserting his and McCollum’s innocence. He urged the Commission to investigate their case. The NCIIC agreed.

The Commission’s ensuing investigation discovered that DNA found at the crime scene belonged to a serial sex offender—a subsequent murderer who had been briefly questioned by investigators in the Buie case. This offender lived just one block from the crime scene. His likely involvement in the Buie murder was not followed up on by the DA’s office. The sex offender went on to rape and kill again.

Other pieces of evidence found at the crime scene were analyzed. Those tests revealed no DNA link to either McCollum or Brown.

In 2014, based on this newly-discovered DNA evidence, the half-brothers, with the assistance of the NCIIC and pro bono attorneys, moved to have their convictions set aside. The Robeson County District Attorney’s Office did not contest this innocence effort. Their convictions were set aside.

On June 5, 2015, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory granted the men full pardons of innocence.

In the wake of Gov. McCrory’s pardon, the State of North Carolina paid each man $750,000 in compensation for the three decades they had been wrongfully imprisoned—a pitiful amount considering the way they were demonized by law enforcement officials like Kenneth Snead, the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, and an entire North Carolina legislature.

But there the suffering from injustice was not over for the freed half-brothers.

People who said they loved the two men and only wanted to help them immediately undertook corrupt efforts to abuse them. An attorney, a guardian and family member ripped off the two men of most of their compensation money.

The New York Times reported in 2018 that the financial abuse by supporters, memories of being repeatedly raped in prison, and the 30 years of wrongful imprisonment ultimately forced Leon Brown into seven different psychiatric facilities.

It would take the North Carolina Bar three more years before they held the attorney accountable for the financial abuse he inflicted on the brothers.

On March 21, 2021, the North Carolina State Bar Disciplinary Hearing Commission suspended the law license of Patrick Megaro for five years—a small price to pay for his contribution to the psychological destruction of a client.

But, finally, justice paid a visit to the wrecked lives of Henry McCollum and Leon Brown.

After just five hours of deliberation, an eight-person federal jury on May 14, 2021 awarded each man $31 million—one million for each year they were wrongfully imprisoned—and $13 million in punitive damages.

In addition to that $75 million judgment, the Robeson County Sheriff’s Department agreed to pay the brothers $9 million for its role in their wrongful conviction.

The Washington Post reported on May 16, 2021 that the federal court had appointed guardians to oversee the brothers’ damage award money.

As of 2021, Henry McCollum had started a new life with a girlfriend in southern Virginia while Leon Brown was living in a long term care facility in North Carolina under 24-hour caretaker supervision. An obituary search does not disclose the death of either man.

One thing is certain: both men remain tortured souls—McCollum with memories of his suicide attempt after seeing his best friend’s body being carted away following the man’s execution and haunted by memories of the pleas for life by the other 42 men he saw walk to their executions while Brown relives the brutalities associated with repeated prison rapes fearing that God will not allow him into the Kingdom of Heaven because of Sodomy Sin.

There is no sorry or amount of money to atone for the damages that SBI Agent Kenneth Snead and his fellow law enforcement cohorts—along with the district attorney, Justice Antonin Scalia, and the entire 2010 North Carolina Legislature—inflicted on the lives of these two defenseless, intellectually disabled Black  men.

Alexei Navalny was the voice of all people, especially the oppressed, who have been brutalized by corrupt and racist criminal justice systems around the world. Cases like Henry McCollum and Leon Brown teach us that the social memory of injustice must never fade.