Can someone be tried for a crime that someone else has plead guilty to?

A young married man had an argument with his wife so he went to stay overnight with his brother and fell asleep on the couch. The brother picks up a female hitchhiker who he believes is 18 and he invites her back to his house and winds up sleeping with her. It turns out she is 15 and a runaway. She goes to the school counselor the next day and says she was raped but does not know which man did it because he "crawled into bed with her and it was dark". Both brothers are charged with Rape of a Child although the allegation is that only one man was responsible. The brother who crawled into bed with her plead guilty but to a lesser charge. Months later, the other brother was advised by his PD to pay him $500 (a bribe) which he did not have and he would get him off or to accept a gross misdemeanor plea of immoral communications with a minor. He was scared to death of the rape charge and told he'd face 20 years in prison so he plead guilty. His PD also did not tell him that they had lost the victim as she had run away again so there was no way he could have faced his accuser in court. This was about 15 years ago. The problem is that he did not realize back then that the gross misdemeanor charge would cause him to have to register forever as a sex offender which has kept him from getting jobs and caused humiliation when his name and photo was included in a sex registry for a state that puts even old gross misdemeanors online. It has affected the entire quality of his life and he is a really good guy, faithful husband (to 2nd wife of several years) and is genuinely sickened by pedophiles and men who, unfortunately like his brother, have loose morals or questionable conduct. He was just a scared young man who took a bad plea orchestrated by a crooked PD under duress. Since there was only one rape charge involving one perpetrator, and no accessory or conspiracy charge, were his civil rights violated in the charges against him (exactly the same ones as against).