Henry McCollum and Leon Brown spent three decades behind bars for a 1983 rape and murder they did not commit. As chronicled this week in the New York Times, those "two convictions were 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 by an informer who previously did not implicate the two. They were overturned last week, and 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. At the same time, 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." This story would be bad enough -- two innocent men sent to death row, the most likely actual killer kills...
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