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

could identify them, and she said no.”
    “You did not think that amounted to anything?” Hunter asked.
    “Well, I helped her.”
    “Don’t you think you would be helping her more if you told the truth for once in your life?” Hunter shouted with vehemence. To this, Akerman did object. And Judge Futch did not pause in his whittling to overrule; in sustaining the state’s objections and overruling those of the defense the judge could not be faulted for inconsistency.
    Hunter continued to grill Burtoft, but after forty-five minutes the state attorney had proved to be unable to shake the young man in his testimony. One last time Hunter implied that Burtoft’s account of Norma Padgett’s presence at Burtoft’s Café early that Saturday morning in July was tantamount to a lie, but Burtoft stood firm. He recalled for the attorney a particular conversation the two of them had shared: “I have told you once before,” Burtoft said, “that she looked to be in pretty calm condition for her husband to be lying down dead beside the road, and you told me . . . that she was not the type of girl to be showing her emotions.” Hunter dismissed the witness.
    For all his attempts to diminish Burtoft’s credibility, Hunter knew better than most that the defense’s surprise witness had not been fiddling with the truth. Under oath, Norma Padgett had denied telling Burtoft that she’d been taken away by four black men at gunpoint, and had denied telling him even that her husband had been in a fight with four Negroes. By her account, she had persuaded Lawrence Burtoft, with no explanation, to drive her to a random spot “down there” by the side of the road where her husband had been. It was preposterous. Furthermore, it was contrary to her own written statement to the FBI—a statement that Hunter himself had helped to prepare only days after the alleged rape—in which Norma avowed that she had shown up at the Burtofts’ place and “reported to a man who runs a store there what had happened to me.” Fortunately for the state’s case, the proof of Norma Padgett’s perjury lay buried in an FBI file, which was not in 1949 and would not in 1952 be introduced as evidence in the trial of the Groveland Boys, or boy. The U.S. attorney’s office had quashed subpoenas served by the defense to have FBI agents testify, citing the “confidential nature of the FBI’s investigation.”
    The testimony of Lawrence Burtoft had, without qualification, been brave, given that his parents not only resided but also owned and operated a business in the county run by Sheriff Willis McCall. Before the retrial, McCall had made it clear to Burtoft that because of his military commitment he did not have to accept a subpoena. Yet Burtoft had returned to Florida, and done so for one reason alone: “To tell what I knew.” In Justice Robert Jackson’s opinion concurring with the Supreme Court decision to reverse the verdict in the Groveland Boys case he addressed the issue of justice beyond the “theoretical importance” of jury selection, for in light of the “prejudicial influence” in the court before and during the trial, he wrote, “The only chance these Negroes had of acquittal would have been in the courage and decency of some sturdy and forthright white person of sufficient standing to face and live down the odium among his white neighbors that such a vote, if required, would have brought.” Though not a juror, such a “white person” was Lawrence Burtoft, and in his testimony as a witness lay perhaps Walter Irvin’s “only chance.”
    In the September 1949 trial, when Walter Irvin had last sat in the witness box, he had been able to share the experience silently, in a look or a glance across the courtroom at the defense table, with his best friend, Samuel Shepherd. They had grown up together in Groveland; as kids they’d played together; in their teens they’d picked citrus together. On the same day, at the same time, they had enlisted in the army, and they’d served together in the same outfit in the Philippines. The last moment that the two of them shared with each other they were, as they had long been, inseparable: joined in spirit, if also linked hand to hand by steel cuffs as they took bullets not from some enemy lurking in an Asian forest, but from two Lake County law enforcement officers. Since then and before, Irvin had presented his version of the events on the roadside outside Okahumpka countless times: to