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

a grand jury, a trial jury, a coroner’s jury; to FBI agents, to newspaper reporters, to doctors—to white people. And none of them, it seemed to Irvin, had believed him, or if they had, they hadn’t cared, and their indifference was going to cost him his life. Walter Irvin glanced across the courtroom; he knew the look he saw in the eyes of the men in the jury box, the look that saw a guilty black man sitting on the witness stand. They’d wanted to lynch him at the jail or on the road, and they had settled for a conviction and the electric chair. They’d accept no less this time round. Those eyes meant business.
    Irvin was fighting for his life, but he had no ammunition beyond the truth that he had recited all those times before. Akerman guided him through his testimony, and again he denied that he had kidnapped and raped Norma Padgett. He denied, too, that the stains on the legs of the pants in evidence had been present when he had taken them off on the morning of July 16. Akerman then turned the witness over to the state attorney. Hunter’s cross-examination focused largely upon where Irvin was on that Friday night in July, so as to place him at the scene of the crime squarely in the time frame of the state’s narrative. The fact that the defense had been unable to produce any alibi witnesses allowed Hunter the opportunity to plot Irvin’s movements in the state’s story more freely. Irvin’s denials in regard to the kidnapping and raping of Norma Padgett concerned Hunter little. Even without the state’s evidence to put Irvin at the scene—the tire tracks, the footprints, the stained pants—the decision for the jury would still come down to Norma’s word against the Negro’s. He had no doubt which way the scales of justice would tilt on that.
    The last witness for the defense landed the bombshell that Marshall felt their case needed. Between two criminal trials, the appeals, and a Supreme Court case in the matter of Groveland Boys, the NAACP had spent nearly fifty thousand dollars on lawyer fees, travel expenses, research polls, and chartered flights. In that, the eight hundred dollars paid to the Miami-based criminologist Herman Bennett was a serious bargain. The defense established his impeccable credentials: thirty years of experience in the field of criminology; stints with the FBI, the Secret Service Division, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and the U.S. Navy; consultation on high-profile criminal cases, including the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. As an expert witness, Herman Bennett more than adequately fulfilled Thurgood Marshall’s expectations. He was no disappointment to Jesse Hunter, either.
    The state attorney sized up Bennett quickly. If the defense saw in him an impressively credentialed criminologist whose testimony would call into question the integrity of the state’s physical evidence, Jesse Hunter saw an elitist big-city windbag, who might not play too well before a “farmer jury.”
    So, just after Bennett had begun recounting his visit to the Lake County Court House in Tavares in the company of defense attorney Paul Perkins, where, by virtue of a court order, he was examining the state’s plaster casts, Hunter interrupted. “Just a minute, please, are you referring to any casts that are in evidence in this case?” Hunter asked.
    Bennett replied, “I am not in a position to answer that question.” But Hunter was; he knew that the only casts that had been entered into evidence had been accidentally broken after Deputy Yates’s examination of them.
    “May it please the court,” Hunter objected. “These casts are not in evidence in this case, we have not introduced them in evidence, and even though I would like to hear this tremendously important man—we seem to have a genius here before us, I would like to hear it—I wish to point out that these casts are not in evidence.”
    Futch of course found the objection good, and it was sustained, to Akerman’s disbelief. Futch had earlier disallowed use of the Roper poll research as evidence, and now he was limiting the defense to an examination only of broken plaster casts on the basis of which Deputy Yates had already presented his findings to the jury.
    Akerman was livid. “If the court please! The defendant at this time—”
    Hunter cut him off. “Just a moment, I am going to withdraw my objection. I want to hear all of this learned testimony from this expert.”
    It was a