Four young blacks were charged in 1949 of raping a white teenage girl in the United States, some were convicted, others cruelly murdered before conviction.
Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd and Ernest Thomas, known as the Groveland Four, and their families fought for decades to have their innocence recognized.
And this Monday, 72 years later, justice was served: a judge of a court of Florida state circuit finally exonerated them of the charges against them.
But none of them lived long enough to be exonerated from the unjust accusations.
In July 1951, Norma Padgett, a white teenager who at the time had 17 years, he told the cops It was reported that Greenlee, Irvin, Shepherd and Thomas had attacked the car where she was with her husband returning home after a dance.
In addition, she assured that the four young people had kidnapped and raped in the town of Groveland, Florida, United States.
Despite insufficient evidence, Norma Padgett’s testimony catapulted the future of the young people who were between 16 and 26 years at that time.
Shepherd and Irvin were in the army; and both Thomas and Greenlee were married.
A jury of white men
Shortly after the alleged incident, Thomas was chased by a group of more than 1. 000 men and received hundreds of shots.
The other three were violently beaten while in police custody, before being convicted by a composite jury exclusively white people.
To stop the beatings, Shepherd and Greenlee were forced to tell FBI agents that they had raped Padgett. Irvin always maintained his innocence.
The three ended up with scars and bruises all over their bodies and broken teeth.
And shortly afterwards Samuel Shepherd was shot and killed by Sheriff Willis McCall while being transferred to a new trial.
Irvin, meanwhile, narrowly escaped being executed in 1954 and his sentence was commuted to life in prison with probation.
In 1969, a year after being granted parole, he died.
Greenlee, who was also sentenced to life in prison and placed in condition freedom ional in 1962, lived with his family until his death in April 2012.
Suggestions of complicity
Heidi Davis, a judge Lake County Circuit Court administrative officer overturned the sentences for Greenlee and Irvin on Monday.
The court also dismissed the charges against Thomas and Shepherd who were never tried. Thomas was murdered before a trial and Shepherd before a sentence was passed.
Carol Greenlee, Greenlee’s daughter, noted that she had been seeking exoneration of the charges against her father since the late 1954, despite the fact that he had forbidden her to do so because the case was very painful for him.
In August, a group of investigators spoke with a grandson of Jesse Hunter, the state attorney who was in charge of the case. Broward Hunter confessed to finding correspondence in his grandfather’s law office suggesting that Jesse Hunter and the judge presiding over the trial knew the rape never occurred.
Investigators also showed themselves skeptical of the evidence provided by James Yates, a deputy sheriff who was the state’s lead witness in the trials of 1949 and of 1951.
This case is considered a historical racial injustice.
In 2013, the Florida state government issued a “sincere apology” to the families of the four men and recommended applying posthumous pardons .
The pardons came two years later in a unanimous vote, despite the insistence of the alleged victim that he had told the truth.
“We feel be ndecidos ”
Faced with this Monday’s decision, the families of Los Cuatro de Groveland expressed with emotion that the annulment of these sentences could provoke a to examination of other similar convictions .
“We feel blessed. I hope this is a start because many people did not have this opportunity. Many families did not have this opportunity, “said Aaron Newson, Thomas’s nephew, who could not hold back his tears as he spoke.
” This country needs to unite, “he added.
Carol Greenlee, the daughter of Charles Greenlee -who at that time had 16 years and was the youngest of the suspects- , she burst into tears and collapsed into the arms of those who accompanied her after hearing the decision.
“If you know something is right, defend it,” she exclaimed later. “Be persistent.”
“Officials, disguised as guardians of peace”
It was the local state attorney, Bill Gladson, who started the process a month ago for the four men to be officially exonerated.
“We followed the evidence to see where it led us and led us to this moment,” he said after the hearing, which had location on the same site where the original trials were held.
In her motion filed in October, Gladson wrote that today no “impartial” prosecutor would even consider the charges and that the evidence suggests “ strongly ”that“ the sheriff, the judge and the prosecutor only made sure to obtain guilty verdicts in this case. ”
“ Officials, disguised as guardians of the peace and disguised as ministers of justice , ignored their oaths and set in motion a series of events that forever destroyed these men, their families and a community, “Gladson continued.
” I have not witnessed a more complete collapse of the criminal justice system than this.
The story of The Groveland Four was told in the book “ Devil in the Grove ” by Gilbert King, who was interviewed by the prosecutor as part of his review of the case.
The work, published in 2012, won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 2013.
Charles Greenlee was the only one of The Groveland Four who lived to read the book, but died shortly after its publication.
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