Groveland Four get justice
Pardons approved for accused men nearly 70 years later
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’s Clemency Board on Friday granted pardons to the men whose lives were ruined by a racist criminal justice system.
Family members of the Groveland Four — Samuel Shepherd, Walter Irvin, Charles Greenlee and Ernest Thomas — erupted in applause when the meeting ended, hugging and congratulating each other.
“It is a weight lifted, it is a cloud lifted. It’s the dignity of being a Greenlee restored, it’s the shame taken away, it’s being let out of prison from a lie that has plagued our family for all these years,” said Carol Greenlee Crawley. “It’s being relieved of not being able to say that you’re a Greenlee. It’s just so overwhelming. It’s like waking up out of a nightmare, out of a terrible dream.”
In the most dramatic moment in the hearing, Beverly Robinson, a cousin of Shepherd, turned to accuser Norma Padgett, now 86 and seated in a wheelchair, and proclaimed the men’s innocence. “You all are liars,” she said.
Padgett, in her first public comments outside of a courtroom in nearly seven decades about what she said happened to her, told the Clemency Board, “I am the victim of that night.”
“I was 17 years old and this never left my mind,” she said.
Padgett said she kept quiet for years because she worried that something might happen to her sons. Now, she worries about her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
“You all just don’t know what kind of horror I’ve been through for all these many years,” Padgett said. She then began crying. “I’m begging you all not to give them pardon, because they done it,” she said.
Despite her pleas, the board, led by newly sworn-in Gov. Ron DeSantis, quickly voted to pardon the men, who are all deceased.
“I am proud of what my mama did and she spoke clearly,” Padgett’s son Sammy Upshaw said in a text when asked his reaction to the decision. “I hope they understood her.”
Padgett and her husband, Willie, said the four men approached them on July 16, 1949, on a dark stretch of road near Okahumpka, where the couple’s car had broken down. At first the men helped, but then they hit Willie Padgett and took his wallet, the Padgetts said. 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 last week. “She’s a good Christian lady.”
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.
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 pointblank. 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 he would take up the case. In Congress, DeSantis represented a portion of Lake.
The new governor and other officials focused on wrongdoing in the case by law enforcement and the court system rather than questioning the validity of Padgett’s story.
“I really believe in the principles of the constitution and getting a fair shake,” DeSantis said on Friday. “I think the way this was carried out was a miscarriage of justice.”
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 County Property Appraiser Carey Baker, a lifelong resident of the county, urged the board on Friday to grant the pardons on behalf on Lake’s constitutional officers.
“In reflecting on this case, it is clear to us that the process for true justice, in this case, was so egregiously flawed, so twisted and so perverted … and the actions of the local law enforcement were just so terrible and just so wrong that true justice could never have been found in those circumstances,” he said. “The only real remedy for this is a full pardon of those accused.”
The case for exoneration
Gov. Rick Scott was asked to grant pardons in the case after the Legislature apologized to the men’s families in 2017, a year after Groveland and Lake County governments apologized for the case. But Scott never brought the case before the Clemency Board.
Scott told the Tampa Bay Times this week the Padgett family never lobbied him on the case, and that facts were still being gathered when he left office. In his first Clemency Board meeting, DeSantis prioritized the case.
Family members of the four accused say they waited too long 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.”
A pardon by the Clemency Board “forgives guilt” from convictions. Technically, only two of the men — Greenlee and Irvin — were 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, but the board extended the pardon to all four as a symbolic gesture.
In a tweet after the meeting, Nikki Fried, the lone Democrat on the Clemency Board, called for a full exoneration of the men.
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, 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.
Within hours of the claims made by Padgett, a racist mob gathered from across Central Florida and burned and looted the home of Shepherd’s family and indiscriminately fired shots into other homes and businesses, driving many of Groveland’s black families away — some for good. The Ku Klux Klan littered streets with pamphlets and the governor called in the National Guard to help keep the peace.
Lake County was far from alone in its struggle with racial tensions, but the case quickly became intimately linked with Groveland, where at least two of the accused lived, including where the home was set ablaze.
Groveland and Lake officials have long been uncomfortable with the association. Today the Groveland historical museum contains no mention of the case.
The Lake County Historical Museum in Tavares, which once served as the jail and courthouse where the men were beaten and tried, has a photo of three of the men, though McCall, known for his brutality as sheriff, is cropped from the picture.
The tribute wasn’t added until last year.
‘Crying for justice’
For all the uneasiness the case brings for some in Lake County, the families of the accused never stopped believing the men were innocent.
Aaron Newson, 57, is a nephew of Ernest Thomas and became intrigued with the case in recent years. He provided a photo of a man he said is his uncle, the first such photo ever published, according to historians who have studied the case.
He said he remembers his mother and grandmother talking about the case.
“My grandmother … she believed along with my mom that he had nothing to do with it,” said Newson, a former corrections officer in New York. “Her thing was that he was in the wrong place, or his name was in the wrong place, at the wrong time.”
His grandmother owned the Groveland-area bar the Blue Flame, which was shot at by the mob after the rape allegation was made. His family fled Lake County after that.
“When you see your mom and your grandmother crying for justice … even though they’re not here anymore, it’s sweet to finally make sure that they got what they wanted,” he said.
Irving, the sister of Walter Irvin, said she has carried her own guilt over his involvement in the case. He only returned to Groveland after serving in World War II because she married James Shepherd, who also happened to be the brother of Samuel Shepherd, when she was just 16.
“That was the only reason he came home,” she said while seated on her walker in her Miami living room. “He didn’t want to see me at 16 go down the wrong road. … I had no business getting married. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Soon after, he was arrested and charged with the crime.
Irving remembers visiting her brother on Death Row: His head was shaved and he was crying.
“He said to my mom, ‘Mom, don’t let them put me in a hole,’” she said. “It came very close.”
A last-minute stay spared Irvin’s life, and his sentence was commuted. He was paroled in 1968, after spending nearly 20 years in prison, and lived in Miami near Irving. She helped him find a house and taught him how to ride the city bus. But, she said, he was different from the brother she knew growing up in Groveland.
“I know he was angry when he left this world,” she said. “I just hope and pray he turned that anger loose.”
He died a year after his release, apparently of natural causes, on his first trip back to Groveland. Greenlee died at age 78 in 2012.
Vivian Shepherd, niece of Samuel Shepherd, said Padgett apologized to Samuel Shepherd’s brother during a brief encounter 20 years ago.
Shepherd said her mother told her that Padgett stopped by their home in Clermont not long before James Shepherd died. Back in the 1940s, the Shepherd family farm bordered that of Padgett’s family.
“My dad let her in and they sat on the porch and they spoke,” Vivian Shepherd told the Sentinel of the encounter, which was first reported by King in The Atlantic magazine in 2017. “Dad said that she came to apologize and she said it never happened.”
Asked whether his mother made such an apology, Curtis Upshaw said she did not.
“I know he was angry when he left this world. I just hope and pray he turned that anger loose.” Henrietta Irvin, sister of Walter Irvin