Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
‘Groveland Four’ could get pardon
Nearly 70 years after a young white housewife said she was kidnapped and raped by four black men near the Lake County citrus town of Groveland, Florida is closer than ever to clearing the men’s names.
The case known as the “Groveland Four” will be up for discussion today at the first Clemency Board meeting of newly sworn-in Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Cabinet. A full pardon — the highest act the board can take — would bring the most significant resolution yet for the families of the men, now all deceased, whose lives were ruined by a racist criminal justice system.
Quietly, though, there’s a countercampaign at work.
Norma Padgett, who was just 17 when she said she was assaulted by the men, is still alive and her family is trying to halt efforts to posthumously vindicate Samuel Shepherd, Walter Irvin, Ernest Thomas and Charles Greenlee.
It’s been almost seven decades since she has talked publicly about the night of July 16, 1949, though a member of the Shepherd family claims Padgett apologized to Samuel Shepherd’s brother during a brief encounter 20 years ago.
Two of her sons said the family is writing letters to DeSantis, insisting that Padgett told the truth when she identified the men as those who kidnapped and raped her.
Padgett and her husband, Willie, said the four men approached them on a dark stretch of road near Okahumpka, where the couple’s car had broken down, and at first helped, but then hit Willie Padgett and took his wallet. The four put Norma Padgett in their car, drove away and raped her in the backseat, she told police.
“My mom don’t lie,” Curtis Upshaw said. “She’s a good Christian lady.”
Upshaw, who grew up in the Groveland area just like his mother, declined reporters’ requests to interview Padgett, who is now 86.
He didn’t offer any counter-point to evidence that suggests the crime never happened. The case was documented in “The Devil in The Grove,” a 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Gilbert King and “The Groveland Four: The Sad Saga of a Legal Lynching” by Gary Corsair.
Upshaw conceded wrongs may have been committed by former Lake Sheriff Willis McCall, a central figure in the case and notorious segregationist who died in 1994.
“Whatever Sheriff McCall did is on Sheriff McCall, but they’re still callin’ my mama a liar,” Upshaw said. “Every time they talk about it, they call her a liar. She’s not a liar.”
Shepherd and Irvin, both 22, who were best friends and from Groveland, were beaten along with Greenlee, 16, in the jail after their arrests. Thomas, 26, a friend of Greenlee’s, was shot and killed by a posse as he fled to the Panhandle days after the alleged crime.
Three years later, McCall shot Irvin and Shepherd as he drove them from the prison in Raiford to Lake County, before they were set to stand trial for a second time after their first convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. McCall claimed the men tried to escape, but Irvin, who survived the shooting, said McCall forced them from the car and shot them point-blank. Greenlee was not included in the second trial because, as the only defendant who received a life sentence rather than death at the first trial, he chose not to appeal.
DeSantis, the Republican former congressman who was sworn in on Tuesday, said just before Christmas that “acts of evil” were committed against the accused “for crimes they did not commit” and promised to take up the case.
All five elected constitutional officers in Lake County, including Sheriff Peyton Grinnell, wrote a letter to DeSantis last month calling for the “exoneration and vindication” of Shepherd, Irvin, Greenlee and Thomas.
Lake Property Appraiser Carey Baker, a former state lawmaker who signed the letter, said he would be “shocked” if the Cabinet fails to take action.
“This particular instance is such a horrible tragedy and blight on Lake County’s past that I think it’s important that we address it,” he said.
Like some other state officials, Baker told the Sentinel he didn’t know Norma Padgett was alive and has family still living in Groveland.
The case for exoneration
It’s unclear whether Padgett or her family played any role in former Gov. Rick Scott’s decision not to grant pardons in the case after Groveland and Lake County governments apologized to the men in 2016 and the Florida House of Representatives apologized in 2017. Documents related to clemency review, including any letters submitted by Norma Padgett’s family or others for or against a pardon, are exempt from Florida’s public records laws.
Family members of the four accused say they have waited long enough for their names to be cleared.
Henrietta Irving, a sister of Irvin and who worked for Padgett’s family in the 1940s, said the men are innocent.
“This woman knows those boys were killed for nothing,” said Irving, 86, of Miami who attended her brother’s trial. “Common sense will know that these boys didn’t rape nobody.”
Vivian Shepherd, niece of Samuel Shepherd, said she expects long-overdue justice to happen soon.
“I believe there’s a time and purpose for everything, and this is it for us,” said Shepherd, a secretary at a Clermont high school. “We’ve been fighting for this and looking to get our names cleared. We can’t bring them [the accused] back and it’s not only them — we feel the pressure and pain as well. … Our names, they have a stain on them and we want them cleared.”
A pardon by the Clemency Board “forgives guilt” from convictions. Technically, only two of the men — Charles Greenlee and Walter Irvin — are eligible because Ernest Thomas was killed before he could ever stand trial and Samuel Shepherd was shot dead by McCall after his first conviction was overturned.
Another possibility is an exoneration, which would wipe the criminal charges from the men’s records and officially declare they did not commit the crime — an action that can be taken after the Florida Department of Law Enforcement reviews the case. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi asked FDLE for such a review “to begin the process” of clearing the men’s names and an FDLE spokeswoman confirmed such a review is underway.
Among the most compelling evidence that the crime never happened:
An FBI report obtained by King, the author of “The Devil in The Grove,” through a Freedom of Information request revealed statements to FBI agents by Norma Padgett that contradicted her trial testimony. One witness, Lawrence Burtoft, was the first to see Padgett after the alleged attack and told prosecutors that she told him she was kidnapped but never mentioned being raped. Burtoft also said she told him she couldn’t identify her attackers. Prosecutors withheld that information from the defense. When Burtoft testified at Irvin’s second trial, Padgett changed her story and said she told him the details about the attack.
A medical report by the doctor who examined Padgett after the alleged crime did not show conclusive evidence that she was raped and was not turned over to the accused men’s defense team.
Charles Greenlee was already in custody of law enforcement when the attack allegedly took place after he was found carrying a pistol without a license, according to King’s research.
Jesse Hunter, the prosecutor in the case, wrote a letter to then-Gov. LeRoy
Collins admitting that he had doubts about Walter Irvin’s guilt and urged him to commute his sentence from death to life in prison. Collins commuted the sentence in 1954.
There was also a complicit local press, which was quick to side with McCall’s brand of justice that was often dispensed in the Jim Crow South. When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1949 convictions, the unanimous opinion not only assailed Lake County’s mistreatment of the accused but also biased coverage in local newspapers,
which included the Sentinel, then known as the Orlando Morning Sentinel.
The justices called the trial “but a legal gesture to register a verdict already dictated by the press and the public opinion it generated.”
The NAACP appealed for donations to the legal defense fund with a pamphlet citing “the notorious Groveland, Florida, rape frame-up” and a Morning
Sentinel editorial cartoon of four electric chairs under the caption “no compromise.”
Historians and authors have theorized that Padgett and her husband, Willie, whom she divorced in 1958 and died some years later, came up with the story of the rape to explain away a volatile relationship that, on that night, left Norma alone on a dark stretch of road.
King reported in his book that Irvin and Shepherd did stop that night to help the Padgetts with the broken-down car. Shepherd got into a fight with Willie Padgett after he made a racist remark and, eventually, Shepherd and Irvin drove off.
By morning, Norma and Willie Padgett told police the four men robbed him and abducted and raped her.
Whether the story was true or not, the accusation quickly spiraled beyond the control of a 17-year-old girl who was suddenly under the pressure of her community and a powerful sheriff.