The US court decided to cancel, 72 years later, the wrongful conviction of four black men wrongly accused of kidnapping and raping a white girl in Florida, in 1949.
Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd and Ernest Thomas, known as the Groveland Four, received a pardon from the State of Florida in January 2019.
None of the accused were still alive when the decision was handed down. They were aged between 16 and 26 at the time of the charges.
Thomas was the target of a manhunt by a group of over a thousand armed men shortly after the alleged crime. The other three defendants were assaulted in custody before being convicted by an all-white jury.
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Shepherd would end up being gunned down by a sheriff while traveling to a retrial.
Irvin narrowly escaped the death penalty in 1954, and his sentence was converted to life in prison, with parole. He would die a year after being released in 1969.
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Greenlee, also sentenced to life in prison, was released on parole in 1962 and died in 2012.
Evidence led us to this moment, says prosecutor
At the prosecution’s request, Florida Judge Heidi Davis threw out the indictments of Ernest Thomas and Samuel Shepherd and overruled the convictions and sentences of Charles Greenlee and Walter Irvin.
Relatives of the four wrongfully accused were deeply moved to learn the news, saying it could trigger a wave of re-examination of other such convictions.
“We are blessed. I hope this is a start because a lot of people haven’t had this opportunity. A lot of families haven’t had this opportunity,” said Aaron Newson, Thomas’ nephew, who began to cry as he spoke. “This country needs to unite.”
Carol Greenlee, daughter of Charles Greenlee (who was 16 at the time of the wrongful charge and the youngest of the suspects) wept and fell into the arms of whoever was beside her when she heard the decision.
“If you know something is right, fight for it,” she said shortly afterwards. “Be persistent.”
State Attorney Republican Bill Gladson filed a lawsuit last month to have the men officially acquitted.
“We followed the evidence to see where it took us, and it took us to this moment,” Gladson said after the hearing, which took place in the same courtroom where the original trials were held.
In 2017, the Florida government issued a “sincere apology” to the four men’s families and posthumously recommended their pardons.
The story of the four men was the subject of the book “Devil in the Grove“, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013.
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