If ever there was a case for the death penalty, the rape and murder of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie in rural North Carolina in 1983 surely was it for those who supported capital punishment.
The girl’s battered and unclothed body was found in a soybean field near her home. The community was sickened, frightened and wanted swift justice. Two days later, police arrested two teenagers who confessed under intense questioning. One got death; the other life.
Then last September, Henry Lee McCollum, 50, on death row for 30 years, was exonerated after DNA evidence pointed to another man who lived a block from where the girl’s body was found. The man had admitted to committing a similar rape and murder around the same time.
McCollum’s half-brother, Leon Brown, 46, sentenced to life for having a role in the crime, also was released. Both men, who are mentally disabled, recanted their confessions many times, saying they implicated themselves under pressure from police.
If ever there was a case against the death penalty, opponents say, that was it. The difference is that now, 30 years later, many of those calling for an end to capital punishment in North Carolina are conservative Republicans who once supported it. “It’s an amazing case. We would have killed an innocent person,” says Ballard Everett, a Raleigh, North Carolina, Republican political consultant and coordinator for North Carolina Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty.
Conservatives coming out against capital punishment are part of a broader movement among conservatives who are supporting criminal justice reform policies once largely the domain of liberal-minded politicians.
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BIBLICAL CONCERNS AND BIAS
Jim Wallis, president and founder of Sojourners, said at a press conference in December that he believes many conservative Christians are voicing their opposition because capital punishment conflicts with biblical teachings.