Two brothers offered $75 million after being wrongly imprisoned for 31 years over murder of 11-year-old girl

Two brothers who spent decades in prison after being wrongfully convicted in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl have been awarded $75 million (£52 million) by a jury in a North Carolina federal civil rights case.

Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, who were teenagers when they were accused of the crime, spent nearly 31 years in jail before they were released in 2014 after DNA evidence implicated another man.

The jury last week decided that the intellectually disabled half brothers should each receive $31 million in compensatory damages — $1 million for every year they spent in prison after their wrongful conviction, the Raleigh News & Observer reported. The jury also awarded them $13 million in punitive damages.

The payout comes after the brothers pursued a civil case against law enforcement members, arguing that their civil rights were violated during the interrogations that led to their convictions.

The brothers’ attorneys have said that they were coerced into confessing. The jury on Friday determined that two former state investigators — Leroy Allen and Kenneth Snead — had violated Mr McCollum’s constitutional rights by coercing him into confessing, according to The New York Times.

“I told the jury that it was up to them to decide how much the pain and suffering of being in hell for 31 years was worth, and asked ‘Is $1 million a year enough to compensate for living in hell?’” Des Hogan, a lawyer assisting the brothers, told The Washington Post.

The Robeson County Sheriff’s Office, which was one of the defendants, settled its part of the case for $9 million on Friday and the town of Red Springs settled in 2017 for $1 million, according to The Associated Press.

The brothers were sentenced to death in 1985 and Mr McCollum became North Carolina’s longest-serving death row inmate. Mr Brown’s sentence was later changed to life in prison.

In 2014, the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission said that DNA found on a cigarette butt, taken from the crime scene, matched another individual named Roscoe Artis’ DNA. Mr Artis was a convicted rapist and murderer who lived less than 100 yards from where the victim's body was found, a statement from the brothers’ attorneys said at the time.