'A long time coming': Groveland Four, four Black men accused of rape, exonerated after 72 years

Four men known as the Groveland Four have been exonerated of the false charges that they raped a white woman in 1949. 

Circuit Judge Heidi Davis cleared the four Black men on Monday after State Attorney Bill Gladson filed a motion to exonerate them last month in what he said was “a complete breakdown of the criminal justice system.”

Davis’ ruling individually dismisses indictments, sets aside judgments and sentences, and corrects the record with newly discovered evidence. 

The men's families sat in the courtroom on Monday with high emotions after the ruling. Some clapped, others embraced and many shed tears.  

More than seven decades ago, a 17-year-old white woman and her husband from rural Groveland, Florida, claimed that four Black men ambushed them and raped her after her husband’s car broke down on a country road in 1949.. Four men were quickly indicted: Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin.

Before he could stand trial, Thomas was killed, shot more than 400 times by a local posse. Despite scant evidence that the men had committed the crime, the others were quickly convicted in the Jim Crow era.

Greenlee, 16 at the time, received a sentence of life in prison. Shepherd and Irvin were sentenced to death.

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The U.S. Supreme Court overturned their original convictions, saying no evidence had been presented. On the way to their second trial, a local sheriff shot Shepherd to death and wounded Irvin in 1951. The sheriff claimed the men tried to escape, but Irvin said they were shot in cold blood.

Thurgood Marshall Sr. of the NAACP at the time and later the nation's first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, represented Irvin in his second trial. Irvin was again sentenced to death by an all-white jury. Irvin narrowly escaped execution in 1954 and Florida Gov. LeRoy Collins commuted his sentence to life with parole in 1968. He died a year later, in 1969.

Greenlee, the youngest of the four, was paroled in 1962 and died in 2012.

Thurgood Marshall Jr., the son of the late U.S. Supreme Court justice, said that perhaps more than any other case the Groveland Four “haunted” his father.

“But he believed better days were ahead,” Marshall Jr. said.

Florida's former attorney general ordered the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to review the case in 2018, and state attorney Gladson began an exhaustive review soon after.

He gleaned through an interview with the prosecutor's grandson that the prosecutor and judge in the case likely knew there was no rape. Gladson also said a deputy who served as a primary witness probably fabricated evidence.

A key piece of evidence in the exoneration centered on Irvin's pants. Prosecutors claimed they were stained with semen, but the pants were never tested in a crime lab. After the pants were examined recently, the results showed no evidence of semen, Gladson's motion said.

“The evidence strongly suggests that a sheriff, a judge, and prosecutor all but guaranteed guilty verdicts in this case," his motion to exonerate the four men state. "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.”

The Florida Legislature formally apologized to the men's families in 2017, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pardoned the Groveland Four in 2019. But a pardon still carries an imputation of guilt. 

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The exoneration fully clears the four.

Carol Greenlee, Greenlee’s daughter, wept in the courtroom on Monday. 

“It’s been a long time coming,” she said, adding that she visited her father in prison and played in the prison courtyard when she was 3 years old.

The men's families said the case might spark a reexamination of other convictions of falsely accused Black men and women from the Jim Crow era.

The well-known case of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy who was lynched in Mississippi after being accused of offending a white woman, occurred six years after the Groveland Four accusations.

“We are blessed. I hope that this is a start because a lot of people didn't get this opportunity," said a tearful Aaron Newson, Thomas' nephew. "A lot of families didn't get this opportunity. Maybe they will. This country needs to come together.”

Contributing: Frank Fernandez, The Daytona Beach News-Journal; Frank Stanfield; Daily Commercial; The Associated Press