"State agrees to $12 million settlement for two wrongly imprisoned men," by Joseph Neff and Mandy Locke for the News & Observer. Also a video of Floyd Brown and Greg Taylor attached to this story.
North Carolina’s State Bureau of Investigation and its insurers have agreed to pay $12.475 million to two innocent men who spent a total of 31 years behind bars.
The state agreed to pay $7.85 million to settle the state lawsuit filed by Floyd Brown, a mentally disabled man locked up for 14 years in a psychiatric hospital based on what his lawyers said was a false confession created out of whole cloth by an SBI agent. Brown has also reached a separate settlement with Anson County, whose sheriff’s deputies helped investigate the case. A federal judge has sealed the Anson County settlement; North Carolina law requires that all such court settlements be public records.
The state also agreed to pay $4.625 million to Greg Taylor, a Wake County man convicted in 1993 for the murder of a woman found beaten and abandoned in an East Raleigh cul-de-sac. Taylor spent 17 years behind bars before a three-judge panel declared him innocent in 2010, the first such exoneration by an independent innocence commission in the United States.
The settlements are not the first large payouts stemming from SBI misconduct.
Earlier coverage from North Carolina begins at the link.
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