And this is why death penalty is horrible:

slate.com

North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory granted pardons of innocence Thursday to Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, two mentally disabled half-brothers exonerated last September of a 1983 murder for which they have served three decades in prison. Superior Court Judge Douglas Sasser last fall ordered the men to be released from death row after DNA evidence implicated another man, and after it became clear that the two had falsely confessed during highly coercive police questioning. As noted in our coverage at the time, the state also declined to test evidence that could have cleared the suspects, and it wasn’t until 2010, when the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission got involved in the case, that the potentially exculpatory evidence was re-examined seriously. At the time of his release, McCollum was North Carolina’s longest-serving inmate on death row.