Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

obliged by law to enter her son’s private room to gather evidence for a deputy without a search warrant. Further, they argued, Dellia Irvin had not voluntarily surrendered her son’s pants to the deputy but rather had been intimidated into doing so by Yates when he stepped into her house. Not until 1961 would the Supreme Court rule, in Mapp v. Ohio , that evidence obtained in an illegal search was inadmissible in state courts.
    Judge Futch closed the day’s proceedings with Dellia Irvin’s testimony, but it was no surprise to Marshall the next morning, when court resumed on Tuesday, February 12, at 9:30 a.m., that Futch, in his first order of business, allowed Walter Irvin’s pants into evidence. That was not the worst of it for the defense. Marshall had also learned that Irvin’s alibi witness—Carol Alexander, the waitress who remembered seeing Irvin and Shepherd at Club Eaton until two or three o’clock in the morning—had not returned to Florida for the trial, despite the fact that she was willing to testify and had already accepted travel expense money. Instead, she remained at Clark University in Atlanta. Her family was unconvinced that the NAACP could guarantee her safety. Of even more concern to Marshall was the possibility that his surprise witness, Lawrence Burtoft, might not get back to Florida in time to testify. He was in the army, at Fort Jackson in South Carolina. The defense’s witness list was in worse shape now than it had been two and a half years earlier, in September 1949, when Irvin was convicted in the Lake County trial.
    Jury selection was no better, either. Of the seven blacks on the panel, four were disqualified because they did not believe in capital punishment. (One of them, Hunter confided to Marshall, was the “best colored man on the panel. Sorry he was excused”—and to his defense team, Marshall confided, “If he says the boy is good then we don’t want him.”) With the state’s peremptory challenges Hunter disposed of the remaining three blacks. Walter Irvin’s fate would be decided by twelve white Marion County men, and again Marshall was hardly surprised. He might have been flattered by a comment made by Jesse Hunter after the jury had been sworn in; pointing at Thurgood Marshall, the state attorney said to a guest of the court, “An ingenious man. Knows more law than any man in the United States.” Hunter liked to take down a proper adversary.
    With trial testimony about to begin, spectators packed the courtroom, blacks upstairs in the balcony, whites downstairs on the main floor. Reporters crowded the press area: Jay Nelson Tuck from the New York Post , Richard H. Parke of the New York Times , Richard Carter with the New York Compass . Carter, who had recently won the prestigious Polk Award for outstanding metropolitan reporting, had been researching a feature story on Groveland in 1949 when he discovered Ernest Thomas’s attempt to tap into the Lake County bolita rackets, which raised the possibility that Thomas’s death had nothing to do with Norma Padgett. Also covering the trial were the Associated Press and the Saturday Evening Post as well as, of course, reporters from the Florida papers, including Ormond Powers of the Orlando Sentinel and Mabel Norris Reese of the Mount Dora Topic . A separate press table accommodated black journalists covering the trial, such as Robert M. Ratcliffe from the Pittsburgh Courier and Arnold DeMille of the Chicago Defender .
    The indictment in the matter of Walter Irvin was read in court, and Jesse Hunter called his first witness. The slight but muscular figure of Willie Padgett trudged to the stand, his face “remarkable,” according to one reporter, with teeth “so large that they stretch the mouth into an expression of perpetual agony. His mouth seems most comfortable when he allows it to hang open, and he seems to do most of his breathing through it.” Padgett related essentially the same story he’d presented in the first trial. His car was stuck; four blacks happened along and offered to help him but then began roughing him up. He picked up a stick, “hit quite a few licks” on them, until they overpowered him and threw him down on the roadside, near a fence, where he lost consciousness. He came to in time to see their car drive away, apparently with Norma inside. He waited approximately thirty minutes till another car finally appeared; it gave him a push, but he couldn’t remember the car’s make or model