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

the state attorney introduced Walter Irvin’s pants, which Yates had obtained from Dellia Irvin without a warrant not long after he and Campbell had beaten the man unconscious in jail. Holding up the evidence, Hunter asked, “Now, Mr. Yates, are there any smears on the front of these pants?”
    “Yes, sir, there are,” Yates said.
    “There are smears all down the side?” Hunter asked.
    “Yes, sir, there are.”
    Hunter passed the pants to the jury. Marshall’s incredulity at Hunter’s country-boy performance about “integrity” for the jurors now yielded to fury. The pants had not only been admitted into evidence by Judge Futch against the motion of the defense but had also been admitted without laboratory examination. Scientific analysis of the evidence—a free service provided by the FBI to local law enforcement—would have almost certainly determined whether or not the stains on Irvin’s pants derived from the defendant’s “emission of seed,” but Hunter had apparently decided, as he had with Norma Padgett’s medical examination, not to take the chance that science might not support the prosecution’s narrative. Not when he could have the jurors eye the evidence in “the old common Florida way.”
    Hunter retired to the prosecution’s table. For the defense, again, as in the Lake County trial of the Groveland Boys and in the coroner’s inquest into Samuel Shepherd’s death, even the evidence seemed to be prejudiced and the verdict predetermined. Frustrated, Marshall and Akerman whispered to each other; enough was enough, they decided. Akerman approached Yates.
    “Now, Mr. Yates, is it true that the defendant Walter Irvin has accused you and the sheriff of Lake County, Florida, of attempting to murder him?”
    Hunter leapt to his feet in objection. Futch sustained.
    “May it please the court,” Akerman said. “It shows bias on the part of this witness toward the defendant.”
    Alex Akerman didn’t wait for a ruling. He returned to his seat beside Marshall.

CHAPTER 20: A GENIUS HERE BEFORE US

    From left to right: Paul Perkins, Jack Greenberg, Walter Irvin, and Thurgood Marshall. ( © Bettmann/CORBIS )
    N ORMA PADGETT LEFT any strutting to be done in the courtroom to the fourth witness for the prosecution. Tall, dark-haired, and movie-star handsome, the twenty-three-year-old Curtis Howard, wearing “a spread collar and a sharply-cut suit,” swaggered with an athlete’s confidence to the front of the courtroom. And vowed to tell the whole truth, so help him God. Howard would break his share of vows over the next few years, as countless affairs and sexual indiscretions with young ladies up and down Lake County would land him three times in divorce suits—all three of them with the same wife: his high school sweetheart, and Leesburg High cheerleader, Libby Dean. No question, the sweet-talking Howard did have charm.
    With all his charisma and his slightly crooked, mischievous smile, Howard had come back to Ocala for the trial from Montgomery, Alabama, where he’d been stationed after his enlistment in the army. Three questions into his testimony on Wednesday, February 13, Howard began breaking his vow to tell the whole truth. The Leesburg native told State Attorney Jesse Hunter that he was currently living in Montgomery with his wife, but, in fact, Howard had run out on Libby in 1950, after she became pregnant with twins, and he had left her in Florida when he’d moved to Alabama. He and Libby were presently in the process of getting their first divorce.
    As in the first Groveland Boys trial, the state attorney took Howard through the events of the early morning hours on July 16, 1949, and, as before, Howard related that he had been working the overnight shift at Dean’s filling station, which was owned by Libby’s father, when, at about 2:30 or 3 a.m., Willie Padgett pulled into the station in his 1940 Ford. Willie looked like he’d been hit above the eye; blood had dried on the side of his face. He told Howard he’d had some trouble.
    “Just tell what happened,” Hunter coached his witness.
    “Well, he gave me information that his wife had been raped,” said Howard.
    Hunter immediately addressed the “mistake” in Howard’s response, and the witness corrected himself, saying that the wife had been “kidnapped and carried away” instead of “raped.” For, by Willie Padgett’s own testimony, he at that point knew only that four black men had abducted his wife, not that