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

calculated risk, but Hunter was odds-on certain that “all of this learned testimony” was going to work in the state’s favor. For Akerman, it was a strange turn in the proceedings, and he hadn’t seen it coming—nor did he see where it was going. Not without self-importance, and slightly arrogant in his courtroom manner, Akerman resumed his conversation with Bennett, both of them discussing with intelligence scientific protocols in the witness’s work worldwide. They might as well have been speaking Polish as far as the farmers and citrus workers on the jury were concerned, and as Hunter and his assistant, Sam Buie, recognized. The state would thus allow the witness for the defense to talk his way expertly into ineffectuality.
    Bennett had begun to elaborate on his findings in regard to the stains on Irvin’s clothing when Buie broke in. “Will you please let him indicate how long he has been doing that particular phase of this work?” Buie asked. “He is setting himself up to be an expert, and he has only given us a general background.”
    Akerman relaxed: at last, a civil exchange instead of an objection. “All right, Mr. Bennett,” Akerman said. “Will you please explain what you know and what your experience has been in regard to stains on clothing and so forth?”
    “Well, the subject of stains on clothing is a scientific question, and is something that can be microscopically and scientifically determined, that is to distinguish between stains, and of course in the field of scientific criminology you have to have a broad general knowledge of every department. There are several different methods in which stains are examined, and the principal and proper manner to examine them in the field of criminology is to examine them by microscope. . . .”
    Akerman, apparently taking his cue from the loquacious Bennett, in long-winded fashion posed a question about semen stains, which prompted another of Bennett’s erudite elucidations, this one on “certain fluorescent quantities.” Again, Buie interrupted. “Name that fluorescent quality and tell what it is!” he demanded.
    And gladly Bennett obliged. “Well, it is a fluorescent substance, and when a garment is placed under an ultra-violet ray light, these little articles of fluorescent material will show up under that light; however, I will say this, that that is not a conclusive test, because of the fact that other foreign matter may have gotten into or on the material, or the cloth, and these other foreign materials might exude a fluorescent fire when exposed to the ultra-violet light, but would enable the investigator to localize that portion. . . .” And his disquisition on stains and cottons and textiles and the specifics of chemical analysis comprehensible to criminologists like himself continued on.
    Hunter and Buie had dispensed with the formality of objections; they simply interposed into Bennett’s testimony their questions and snide requests for reiteration or further explanation. Futch meanwhile whittled, like a substitute teacher tolerating an unruly class. At one point Hunter even meandered among the spectators, and while laughing and “cracking wise to his friends,” he heckled the defense from the floor. When Akerman finally realized the state attorney’s intent, he demanded that the judge “stop the prosecutor from heckling and laughing.” The judge told the witness to “get on with the testimony.”
    What nearly got lost in the courtroom circus was the criminologist’s testimony that the plaster casts made by Deputy James Yates had been faked . “After carefully studying these shoes and casts,” Bennett concluded that in his opinion “there was no foot in the shoe at the time the impression was made.” Whereas a normal footprint would leave a concave impression, Bennett explained, the impression made by an empty shoe or one with a shoe tree inside it would be convex. The impressions in Deputy Yates’s casts of Irvin’s shoes, Bennett declared, were patently convex.
    In cross-examination, for the benefit of the jury, Hunter feigned incredulity at the claim made by the defense’s expert witness—and skewed by the state attorney—that all people wear out their shoes the same way, for surely such a proposition must defy good old Florida common sense. To Bennett, he addressed the question: “Then it is your contention that all these twelve gentlemen on the jury wear out the soles of their shoes in exactly the