Miami.- The so-called “Groveland Four“Four African Americans wrongly convicted after being denounced by a young white woman for allegedly abusing her in 1949, have been posthumously exonerated by decision of a judge in Florida, United States.
Ernest Thomas, Samuel Shepherd, Charles Greenlee y Walter Irvin, known as the “Groveland Four”, had already been pardoned in 2019 by the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, but the judicial decision goes further, since it invalidates everything that was acted on in relation to the case that took place in late 1940 and 1950.
The exoneration, which was claimed by the families of the “Groveland Four” and civil organizations, was brought to justice last month by state attorney William Gladson.
The Republican governor and the state Clemency Executive Council had unanimously approved in 2019 to grant an official posthumous pardon to the four, recognizing that their case had a racist bias and was plagued by irregularities.
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In 2020 DeSantis attended the inauguration in the city of Groveland (central Florida) of a plaque with the photos of the “four” and the legend: “The brutality and injustice that these men suffered resulted in the unjust death of Thomas and Shepherd and the wrongful incarcerations of Irvin and Greenlee. “
The events occurred in 1949 in Lake County (central Florida), where a 17-year-old white girl said she had been raped.
Soon after, three young African-Americans were arrested and beaten, and a fourth, Thomas, managed to escape, sparking a manhunt of more than a thousand men.
Finally, they found Thomas sleeping under a tree and four hundred shots were fired at him, according to local media.
At the same time, an angry mob marched into a neighborhood with an African-American population and set fire to several houses, a riot that took days to suffocate.
Three of those arrested, Greenlee, Irvin and Shepherd, were convicted despite the fact that the evidence provided was dubious and a doctor’s opinion maintained that the teenager had probably not been raped. Greenlee was sentenced to life in prison and Shephered and Irvin to death.
In 1951, shortly after a Florida Supreme Court judge ordered a retrial, then-Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall shot Irvin and Shepherd on the grounds that they had tried to escape when transferred to another prison.
Shepherd died and Irvin was shot in the neck of the survivor, even though an ambulance refused to take him to a hospital because he was African American.
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Irvin was paroled in 1968 and found dead in his car a year later. As for Greenlee, the authorities granted him bail in 1960 and he passed away in 2012.
