The Groveland Four: A ‘shameful chapter’ continues
In the winter of 1955, Florida Gov. LeRoy Collins had to decide whether to spare the life of Walter Irvin, a black man about to be executed for the alleged rape of a white woman at Groveland, in Lake County, six years before.
It is common knowledge now, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Irvin was innocent. So were three others falsely accused. But two were already dead: one slain by a posse as he slept, another murdered by the racist sheriff who framed them. The fourth, whom a jury spared because he was only 16, was serving a life sentence.
Collins strongly doubted Irvin’s guilt, but a pardon would have been out of the question. Florida was deeply Southern in more than geography back then — so racist that a leading newspaper had remarked on the alleged crime with a front- page cartoon depicting four electric chairs, captioned “No Compromise.”
The best Collins could do, knowing that he needed the elected Cabinet’s support, was to commute the sentence to life in prison.
Even that called for rare courage, since Collins anticipated seeking re-election in a campaign he feared would turn on the U.S. Supreme Court’s bitterly resented desegregation decisions. It did, although he won.
When the attorney general suggested the governor first sample public opinion in Lake County, Collins said Irvin’s life should depend only on the facts of the case.
“In all respects my conscience told me that this was a bad case, badly handled, badly tried, and now on this bad performance, I was asked to take a man’s life. My conscience would not let me do it,” Collins said later.
Irvin survived to be paroled. So did Charles Greenlee, the teenager who provably had been 20 miles from the scene of the alleged rape. Both have since died.
It was too late for Ernest Thomas, who was killed by Sheriff Willis McCall’s posse; and for Samuel Shepherd, whom McCall shot, along with Irvin, while transporting them for a new trial the U.S. Supreme Court had ordered. On what he thought might be his deathbed, Irvin insisted on his innocence to the prosecutor who convicted him, who recommended that Collins spare him.
Florida has come a long way since then. In a resolution adopted 117-0 in the House and 36-0 in the Senate, the Florida Legislature last year acknowledged that the men known as the Groveland Four “were the victims of gross injustices and that their abhorrent treatment by the criminal justice system is a shameful chapter in this state’s history.”
The resolution offered a “heartfelt apology” to the families of the four men and urged Gov. Rick Scott and the Cabinet to ask for an “expedited clemency review” of petitions from the families and grant them full posthumous pardons.
But that shameful chapter, as the Legislature rightly described it, is not over.
The Groveland Four were not on the agenda of the December meeting of the Board of Clemency — Scott and the Cabinet — but rather, postponed with no new date announced. Neither Scott nor any of the Cabinet — Attorney General Pam Bondi, Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis and Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam — were willing to say why they haven’t acted or when they might. Time is running out. All but Patronis will be out of office four weeks from now.
Scott’s press office put out a smokescreen, saying that although he is “strongly against any form of racial injustice,” the cases are pending before the Florida Commission on Offender Review — formerly the Parole Commission — which conducts clemency investigations for the Cabinet. In order words, it’s all about procedure.
But that agency is so notoriously lethargic, it’s one of the reasons why people last month voted to automatically restore voting rights to more than 1.4 million people who have completed felony sentences.
Citing clemency board rules that make virtually everything secret, the commission refused Wednesday to say when, if ever, it will complete the Groveland Four review. Scott’s staff said Thursday that all options are being reviewed.
It is hard to imagine the offender-review commission is even competent to deal with the issues of such an ancient case. It normally concerns itself with whether living people have earned release from prison or should have their civil rights restored. It does not have the expertise to reinvestigate the circumstances of a miscarriage of justice that the Legislature’s resolution took four pages to describe. The details have been well told and repeatedly confirmed over the years, notably by Gilbert King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
book “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America.”
The Legislature accepted as fact every disquieting detail, including the exclusion at trial of critical evidence, medical testimony that pointed to their innocence and beatings by McCall that coerced Greenlee, Irvin and Shepherd into making false confessions. A sheriff ’s deputy implicated Irvin with plaster casts of shoe prints made with empty shoes.
Scott and the Cabinet should cast away the crutch of “procedure” and deal with the ancient wrong as straightforwardly as the Legislature unanimously did.
In fact, they have the power to waive procedure and take up the case, or any other, whenever they want.
The obvious conclusion is they simply don’t want to. It’s as if they would rather let the ancient wrong fester, rather than do something that might annoy some racist somewhere.
And that is why we began this commentary with the example of Gov. LeRoy Collins — and of his decency and courage at a juncture infinitely more fraught with political consequences than a posthumous pardon.
Do the right thing, Gov. Scott. You have four weeks left.
Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O'Hara, David Lyons and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.