After apologies and pardons, give a final exoneration to the Groveland Four

From the outset in 1949, the saga of the Groveland Four was a lynching disguised as a criminal case. One defendant was murdered by a sheriff ’s posse, another by the sheriff himself. A third went to death row and a fourth, only 16 at the time, was sentenced to life. They were all innocent.

Florida executed Black men for raping white women in those days, and nowhere was it more dangerous to be so accused as in Lake County, ruled by the notoriously racist sheriff Willis McCall. History has vindicated the four men, the last of whom died nine years ago. The Legislature formally apologized. The governor and Cabinet pardoned them. This ugliest chapter in Florida legal history can finally be closed when a judge grants a new prosecutor’s pending motion to set aside their ancient indictments and convictions, restoring their presumption of innocence.

State Attorney William Gladson’s motion is more than a formality. It teaches lessons, if we can learn from them. In this case, they show how easily justice can be perverted, especially when race is involved; why it is wrong for some politicians to try to erase such history from the American record; and the importance of electing governors who will commute death sentences when guilt is in doubt and Cabinet members who will support them. But for Gov. LeRoy Collins, Groveland defendant Walter Irvin would have died in the electric chair in 1955 rather than survive to be paroled.

And yet, clemency has vanished from Florida. There hasn’t been another death row commutation since 1985. Florida has put 99 people to death since then.

“Even a casual review of the record reveals that these four men were deprived of the fundamental due process rights that are afforded to all Americans,” wrote Gladson, the new state attorney in the Fifth Circuit, which includes Citrus, Hernando, Lake, Marion and Sumter counties.

Gladson’s motion, following a review that former Attorney General Pam Bondi had assigned to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, describes a stunning history of racial prejudice driving a corrupt prosecution in which the men were beaten for confessions, the state suppressed medical evidence that the young white woman complainant might not have been raped at all, and footprint casts supposedly implicating Irvin were made by a deputy who had fabricated similar “evidence” in another case.

Collins was under intense pressure from Sheriff McCall to sign Irvin’s death warrant. For some other Southern governor contemplating reelection, that would have been the easy and safe way out, considering the tensions then building over the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision.

“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 this,” Collins said.

Irvin was paroled in 1968 and died an apparently natural death soon after.

Charles Greenlee, sentenced to life when he was 16, was the only one of the Groveland Four to live to old age. Paroled in 1962, he died in 2012. The FDLE file reflects that he was probably in jail on a vagrancy charge at the time when the woman said she was attacked.

The other two defendants were shot dead: Ernest Thomas, by McCall’s posse, Samuel Shepherd by McCall as he was transporting him and Irvin in connection with a new trial that the U.S. Supreme Court had granted. He shot Irvin also, but he survived to be convicted and condemned again.

McCall claimed they had tried to escape. Irvin said he had pulled them handcuffed from his car and shot them in cold blood.

Harry T. Moore, Florida’s earliest civil rights activist, campaigned for McCall to be indicted. Six weeks later, Moore and his wife Harriet were fatally injured by a bomb planted under their home in Mims, just north of Titusville. The crime remains unsolved.

The Groveland affair has been exhaustively reported over the years, so there were few surprises in the FDLE report and Gladson’s summary.

But there was a big one: Gilbert King, the author whose book, “Devil in the Grove,” reawakened interest in the case, reported receiving an e-mail from Broward Hunter, a grandson of the original prosecutor, Jesse Hunter, in which he said his grandfather and the judge knew by the time of the second trial that there was no rape. (The complaining witness insisted otherwise in opposing the posthumous pardons for the Groveland Four.)

In the second trial, the jury was led to believe that there were semen stains on trousers that had been seized from Irvin’s home, but they were never sent off for scientific testing. A doctor who examined the woman had found no evidence of rape. Last month, the FDLE sent the trousers, still preserved as evidence, to its Orlando crime lab, which reported that “no semen was identified.”

“Given these facts today,” Gladson told the court, “no fair-minded prosecutor would even consider filing these charges and no reasonable jury would convict. The evidence strongly suggests that the sheriff, the judge and the prosecutor all but ensured guilty verdicts in this case. These officials, disguised as keepers of the peace and masquerading as ministers of justice, disregarded their oaths, and set in motion a series of events that forever destroyed these men, their families, and a community …

“I have not witnessed a more complete breakdown of the criminal justice system, nor do I ever expect I will again,” Gladson said.

May he be right about that.