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

however, that as a reporter and columnist for the Mount Dora Topic , she had collaborated with Lake County’s officers of the law and the court. “I was probably prejudicing minds by my pipeline information [from Hunter] without thinking about it too much. I probably needed to be stepped on.” The reversal of verdict subjected Reese to criticism along with Hunter and McCall; it also chastened her. Certainly, by the time of the retrial, her hostility toward the NAACP and the LDF lawyers had abated. Early in the proceedings she had suggested to Marshall that he attend a “Lake County NAACP conference” where whites and blacks could air their opinions about the Groveland Boys case and its ramifications. Marshall’s answer had surprised her; he said that he would be very pleased to attend “because of its possible good effects upon race relations and the United States’ world-wide fight against communist propaganda which seeks to blacken us through our race difficulties.” His positive response even prompted Reese to praise Marshall in a letter to J. Edgar Hoover. (Reese’s letter requested that the results of the FBI’s investigation be released. Hoover replied that the investigations were confidential.)
    After Reese’s lunch with Hunter, at the end of the recess, she accompanied the state attorney back to the courthouse, where he would be presenting his closing argument that afternoon. In the hallway, just outside the courtroom, they spotted Deputy James Yates. Reese felt Hunter’s hold on her elbow tighten; they broke their pace, and he leaned in toward her. “Stay away from that man as far as you can,” Hunter whispered. “He just like to hurt people.”
    Court reconvened. Alex Akerman approached the jury. He argued the evidence, or lack of it, by which the state was attempting to reconvict Walter Irvin. Addressing first the alleged rape itself, he made clear that the defense was questioning not what Norma Padgett had said had happened to her on the night of July 15 but whom she had identified as her assaulters. “We don’t say that she was not raped or ravished in that place, but we do say that this defendant knows nothing about it.” While Akerman did point out the state’s failure to produce medical evidence in support of Norma’s ravishment—“I understand she was taken to a medical doctor by the deputy sheriffs, and I submit to you gentlemen that there should have been medical testimony in this case, and none was introduced to show whether or not this young lady was actually raped or ravished”—he kept the jury focused on the issue of identity. As had Marshall before the recess for lunch, Akerman argued after it in terms of the folksy Florida common sense that Jesse Hunter so valued. “Now I think most of you have had the experience of identifying Negroes. I know it is true with me, and I believe it is true with just about every one of you gentlemen, that the first time you see a Negro, you see nothing but a Negro, and if you see him again the next day, you probably would not recognize him as being anything but a Negro, and after he has worked for you say two or three or four or five or six days, then you finally begin to recognize him, and distinguish him as Jim or Joe or Jack or George. But as a matter of fact, if you have never seen a Negro but one time and it was in the dark, on a dark night, such as this alleged case was, then I submit to you gentlemen that you would not be able to recognize him again, so positively as Norma Padgett did.”
    Akerman then proceeded to the failure on the part of the state to send physical evidence to the FBI for analysis and to its reliance instead on the forensic skills of the less qualified deputy James Yates. Furthermore, Akerman clarified, the defense had paid the expert witness Herman Bennett to analyze the deputy’s plaster casts; they had not paid him, as the state had implied, to falsely claim that the evidence had been compromised, or faked. If the defense had indeed been paying Bennett for false testimony, they would have had him testify simply that the plaster-cast footprints did not match the soles of Walter Irvin’s shoes. In fact, the prints did match, but the impression was not convex. “Now, we don’t want to say, and we do not know, and we do not contend that the Deputy Sheriff put a shoe tree in them, and made a false impression, we don’t contend that at all, and we don’t contend that Sheriff McCall did it,” Akerman