RALEIGH (AP) — The State Bureau of Investigation said Monday that the agency and its insurers have agreed to pay more than $12 million to two men who spent a combined 31 years behind bars for crimes it was later found that they didn’t commit.
The News & Observer of Raleigh reports the state agreed to pay $7.85 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Floyd Brown, who was locked up for 14 years in a psychiatric hospital for what his lawyers said was a story made up by an SBI agent.
Brown reached a separate agreement with Anson County authorities who investgated his case.
The state also agreed to pay $4.625 million to Greg Taylor, who was convicted in 1993 for murder. He 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.
Taylor was sent to prison for the murder of a woman found beaten and abandoned in an East Raleigh cul-de-sac.
In 2009, the SBI and its insurers agreed to pay $3.9 million to Alan Gell, a former death row inmate who spent nine years behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit.