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

inside the café, and she testified that she had asked him for a ride to the roadside spot a few miles away where she had left her husband. She could not, however, recall anything further about their conversation, she said.
    “What did you tell him?” Akerman asked.
    “I don’t remember what I told him,” Norma replied. “I was crying. I don’t remember now what I did tell him.”
    Not convinced, Akerman tried to probe further. He wanted to establish that Norma had told Burtoft she’d been “taken off by four Negroes”: “You did not tell him that?” he asked.
    “No, I did not.”
    “You did not discuss with him whether or not those things happened to you?”
    “No, I didn’t tell him anything about it, I was just getting him to take me down there,” Norma answered.
    “That is all,” said Akerman, resigned. It was beginning to appear that the only hope for the defense lay with Lawrence Burtoft, if they could get him to court in time to testify.
    Of Norma Padgett’s moment in the retrial of Walter Irvin, the award-winning journalist Richard Carter wrote, “You watch her on the witness stand. You listen to her story. You note the righteous ferocity with which the prosecution defends that story. You note the timidity with which the defense challenges it. You count the dead . . . Ernest Thomas . . . Sammy Shepherd . . . maybe Walter Irvin . . . and you realize that it’s perfectly all right to starve a Southern white woman and deprive her of education and make her old before her time, but by God, no damned outsider is going to dare question the sanctity of her private parts, the incontrovertibility of her spoken word.”
    The state attorney called Deputy James Yates, and Marshall studied the “gum-chewing husky in a red corduroy jacket”: the officer who had tried to bar the NAACP special counsel’s hospital visit with his client; the sheriff’s man who found it a “funny thing” and offered “no comment” when asked by a reporter if he’d shot Irvin; the law enforcer who had so badly beaten the Groveland Boys that even the FBI pressed for his indictment; the deputy who, special investigator J. J. Elliott warned Marshall, “is going to get you.”
    As he had in the first trial, Hunter led Yates through his testimony, and as he had before, the deputy stated that the plaster casts he’d made of tire tracks and footprints at the rape scene “exactly” matched the soles of Irvin’s shoes and the tread of tires on James Shepherd’s Mercury. On cross-examination, again as before, Yates admitted to Akerman that he’d had no formal training in making casts, nor had he made the casts until hours after the alleged rape, by which time Irvin had been arrested and both the shoes and the car had been placed in the sheriff’s custody. Asked if he was familiar with the scientific devices used in “protecting the integrity” of the tracks, Yates replied, “No, I don’t know what you mean.” Furthermore, Yates noted, he had not been able to deal with footprints and tire tracks in a more timely manner because he’d had to attend to “that woman,” Norma Padgett, who “was hurt and I had to get her back to the doctor, and I came on out there later, and poured the tire casts.”
    An irritated state attorney rose for redirect examination. Hunter did not appreciate Akerman’s belittlement of the deputy’s expertise in crime scene techniques. To rehabilitate his witness in the eyes of the “farmer” jury, Hunter offered some plainspoken down-home common sense as opposed to the highfalutin language of scientific expertise. “Now, Mr. Yates,” Hunter began, “did you ever hear of what he calls ‘integrity’ of those tracks? Did you ever hear of that before?”
    “No, sir, I never have,” Yates said. “I don’t know anything about it.”
    “You were not looking for integrity of tracks, were you?”
    “No, sir.”
    “You were looking for the tracks, were you not?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “That was your business, was it not?”
    “Yes, sir,” Yates agreed.
    “And you just looked and saw that those were the same tracks that fitted those shoes, did you not?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And as to whether or not those tracks had integrity, you were not interested in that, were you?”
    “No, sir,” Yates replied.
    “And you know those shoes made those tracks, do you not?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And that is the old common Florida way of putting it, is it not?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Then