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

same manner, each one of them?”
    “Well, a shoe is never completely [worn] out,” Bennett answered, as baffled by Hunter’s question as the jurors had been by the criminologist’s confoundingly technical answers.
    “Do you mean to say that they are worn exactly alike and that all these men walk exactly alike?”
    Bennett offered a detailed analysis of shoe construction and weight distribution, from which Hunter wrenched the false conclusion he had been using to sway the jury with his more plainspoken common sense. “Well,” he said, “I am going to let the jury be the judges of that fact themselves, as to whether or not they all wear their shoes at the same rate and in the same way.” As Hunter had done from the minute that Bennett had so solidly taken the stand, he had again, as Greenberg noted, “ridiculed the testimony.”
    The state attorney ended his cross-examination by obliging Bennett to reveal his $150-per-day fee. “Then, as a matter of fact,” reported Hunter, his voice booming, “you are getting from seven to eight hundred dollars to testify as an expert in this case about this stuff you have testified about?” Bennett answered yes, and with that, Hunter dismissed the witness. “That is all,” he said and, with some undisguised disgust, added, “That is enough.”
    With the day’s proceedings ended, Marshall, Perkins, and DeMille repaired to the home of a local family that had agreed to accomodate some of the black reporters and lawyers. Greenberg had moved to a hotel in downtown Ocala where most of the out-of-town whites with an interest in the trial were staying. That evening Greenberg was eating by himself in the hotel dining room when Jesse Hunter asked if he might join the opposing counsel. Unable to “chew anything substantial,” Hunter ordered cornbread and milk, which dribbled down his chin onto his shirt as he made desultory small talk—and Greenberg listened patiently to Hunter’s tale of a recent trip up north to his nephew’s graduation, after which the young people did not want to be seen eating with Uncle Jesse. Mostly, though, the two men ate in silence. Hunter had maybe a spoonful of soppy cornbread left when he looked up from the bowl and for a few seconds considered Greenberg’s patient mien before he spoke. “McCall’s a brute,” he said, then scooped up the last of the cornbread and bade Greenberg good night, leaving the dazed young lawyer with the check.

    W HEN TESTIMONY RESUMED on Thursday morning, February 14, the prosecution opened with an unusual maneuver. Sam Buie requested permission to return Walter Irvin to the stand for further cross-examination. To no one’s surprise, Akerman objected, reminding counsel that they were in the state’s rebuttal.
    “We do not insist on it,” Buie replied, “we just have one question to ask him, but it is within this court’s discretion.”
    The impropriety of the request did not warrant even the brief second of consideration Futch gave it before ruling, “The objection is good I think and is sustained.”
    “All right,” said Buie, smiling toward the jury as he withdrew, “we don’t insist on it. If they don’t want him back on the stand, it’s all right.”
    Fuming, Marshall and Akerman requested that Futch excuse the jurors so that they could make a motion. In the absence of the jury, the defense moved for a mistrial on the grounds that under the Constitution a defendant is not required to take the stand and “no comment can be made before the court or the jury as to the failure of the defendant to take the stand”: which, Akerman pointed out, the state had just done twice. Futch denied the motion nonetheless. The jury returned, the prosecution resumed.
    Bennett’s assertion that Deputy James Yates had faked the footprints on the plaster casts had gnawed at Hunter all night. To vouch for Yates’s forensic aptitude and thereby validate further the conclusions in his testimony, the state called Leroy Campbell, the former Lake County deputy who was now employed by the police department in the city of Leesburg. Campbell testified that he had been present with Yates the entire time the footprints were being cast in plaster. It was solid evidence, he assured the jury.
    Having buttressed Yates’s credibility, Hunter set out next to blemish Lawrence Burtoft’s character. For that, the state attorney knew whom he could trust. He called Willis V. McCall, sheriff of Lake County, who affirmed only that he