“Come, let us sing joyfully to the Lord. . . . Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving,” exclaims the psalmist in calling us to rejoice this Sunday. There was rejoicing and thanksgiving aplenty in a North Carolina courtroom Tuesday when two mentally disabled half-brothers were declared innocent and released 30 years after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl.

The case against the men, always weak, fell apart after DNA evidence implicated another man with a history of rape and murder. The startling shift in fortunes for the men, Henry Lee McCollum, now 50, who has spent three decades on death row, and Leon Brown, 46, who was serving a life sentence, provided one of the most dramatic examples yet of the potential for false, coerced confessions and also of the power of DNA tests to exonerate the innocent.

As friends and relatives of the two men wept, a superior court judge, Douglas B. Sasser, said he was vacating their convictions and ordering their release. “Thank you, Jesus,” said McCollum’s father as the judge said that the convictions were void. “Thank you, Jesus,” he repeated.

Lawyers for the two men from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, a nonprofit legal group in North Carolina, began pressing for DNA testing of the physical evidence in the case, which included a cigarette butt found near sticks used in the murder.

Recent testing by an independent state agency, the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, found a match for the DNA on the cigarette butt—not to either of the imprisoned men, but to Roscoe Artis, who lived only a block from where Sabrina Buie’s body was found and had a history of rape convictions.

“I have never stopped believing that one day I’d be able to walk out that door,” McCollum said in a recent videotaped interview. “A long time ago, I wanted to find me a good wife, I wanted to raise a family, I wanted to have my own business and everything,” he said. “I never got a chance to realize those dreams. Now I believe that God is going to bless me to get back out there.”

Homily hint: DNA evidence is a relatively recent addition to forensics, and none too soon. It has already led to the exoneration of numerous people who otherwise faced lengthy prison sentences and even a death sentence. Such exonerations should provide all the evidence we need that the death penalty must be abandoned. The possibility of sending an innocent person to their death is a horror that must be prevented at all costs.

Source: An article by Johathan M. Katz and Erik Eckholm for The New York Times