LUMBERTON, N.C.—New DNA evidence has freed a death-row inmate and his half-brother after they spent three decades in prison for rape and murder.

A judge overturned the convictions of Henry McCollum, 50, and Leon Brown, 46, after another man’s DNA was discovered on a cigarette butt left near the body of a girl the siblings were convicted of killing in 1983. Tuesday’s ruling is the latest twist in a notorious legal case that began with what defence attorneys said were coerced confessions from two scared teenagers with low IQs. McCollum was 19 at the time and Brown was 15.

Superior Court Judge Douglas Sasser said the new DNA results contradicted the case prosecutors put forward.

He said he was vacating their convictions and ordering their release “based on significant new evidence that they are, in fact, innocent.”

The DNA from the cigarette butts doesn’t match Brown or McCollum, and fingerprints taken from a beer can at the scene aren’t theirs either, attorneys say. No physical evidence connects them to the crime.

Both were initially given death sentences, which were overturned. At a second trial, McCollum was again sent to death row, while Brown was convicted of rape and sentenced to life.

Family members of the men gasped and some sobbed as the judge announced his decision to the packed courtroom. Brown smiled and shook a defence lawyer’s hand and McCollum looked spent and relieved

“We waited years and years,” said James McCollum, Henry McCollum’s father. “We kept the faith.”

Defence lawyers petitioned for their release after a recent analysis from the butt pointed to Roscoe Artis, 74, who lived near the soybean field where Sabrina Buie’s body was found in Robeson County. Artis is already serving a life sentence for a similar rape and murder that happened less than a month later.

Because of paperwork, it took until Wednesday for the men to walk free. They were required to return to the prisons where they have been serving time before they can be processed out.

The men’s freedom hinged largely on the local prosecutor’s acknowledgement of the strong evidence of their innocence.

“The evidence you heard today in my opinion negates the evidence presented at trial,” Johnson Britt, the Robeson County district attorney, said during a closing statement before the judge announced his decision. Britt was not the prosecutor of the men.

Even if the men were granted a new trial, Britt said: “Based upon this new evidence, the state does not have a case to prosecute.”

Minutes later, Sasser made his ruling.

The day-long evidence hearing on Tuesday included testimony from Sharon Stellato. The associate director of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission discussed three interviews she had over the summer with Roscoe Artis, 74, a convicted sex killer also held on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh.

Artis was convicted of assaulting three other women and who lived only a block from where the victim’s body was found.

In an interview with The Star, Stellato said that Artis did not confess to the crime but repeatedly told her that McCollum and Brown were not guilty of the Buie murder.

“He has always stated that they were innocent,” Stellato told the Star.

She said he offered no explanation for his assertion that the wrong men were convicted for her killing.

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Artis first told her that he didn’t know Buie, but then changed his story several times until he was stating that she visited him daily and that she hugged and kissed him on the day she went missing.

“His story was inconsistent,” Stellato said.

Just weeks after the Buie murder, Artis confessed to the rape and murder of an 18-year-old girl in Red Springs. Artis was originally sentenced to death, but that sentence was later reduced.

Stellato said that Artis told her that saw the girl the night she went missing and gave her a coat because it was raining, which might explain why his DNA was at the crime scene.

However, weather records show it didn’t rain either the night Buie went missing or the next day.

Artis said the girl was alive the last time he saw her, as she left his house.

Her body was discovered in a rural soybean field, naked except for a bra pushed up against her neck. Near her remains were two bloody sticks and cigarette butts.

Lawyers for the two men said the new testing leaves no doubt about their clients’ innocence.

“We were very hopeful that it would come out this way. We knew the strength of it,” said James Payne, an attorney for Brown.

Ken Rose, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham, has represented Henry McCollum for 20 years.

“It’s terrifying that our justice system allowed two intellectually disabled children to go to prison for a crime they had nothing to do with, and then to suffer there for 30 years,” Rose said.