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

maintained. “We are not casting any dispersions [ sic ] or misrepresentations against any persons whatsoever. But we do say this . . . we believe we have proved it. . . .”
    State Attorney Jesse Hunter rose. He was not only closing the argument for the prosecution; he was also capping a career in law that had spanned four decades, in which time he had argued no case as controversial or as consequential as the Groveland Boys. He surveyed the packed courtroom; he eyed the press tables, the reporters, many of whom he had known for years. The case, the public, the court, his vanity—they demanded a virtuoso performance. He turned his attention to the gentlemen of the jury.
    Hunter started on an accordant note. He agreed, he said, with Marshall’s assertion that every man, black or white, was entitled to a fair trial, and as state attorney he had built his career on that principle. “Gentlemen, although I am not trying to brag about it, I wish to tell you that in any case where I sincerely believed that the defendant charged with the crime was innocent . . . there was nothing in the world that I could do but tell the court to dismiss him. I have done that many times. . . . I have never prosecuted a man in my career who I believed to be innocent of the crime with which he was charged. I have never prosecuted a man that I did not think was guilty. Now, gentlemen, I tell you this, I don’t want on my soul or my conscience the prosecution of an innocent man, and I am always careful about that thing.”
    It was Hunter’s reprise of the testimony of Lawrence Burtoft under his lengthy cross-examination by the state attorney that brought the proceedings to a momentary standstill. “My friend criticized me for some of the questions I asked Mr. Burtoft,” Hunter began, “because I asked him if he did not have it in for the law enforcement agencies of Florida and Lake County, and by a technicality he stopped me from proving it.” Hunter was convinced that Willis McCall would have been able to discredit Burtoft had Judge Futch allowed the sheriff to testify.
    Akerman shot to his feet. “May it please the court!” he shouted. “We ask that the jury be withdrawn.”
    “For what purpose?” Futch asked.
    “For the purpose of making a motion to the court out of the presence of the jury.”
    Futch had the jury withdraw. As Akerman and Marshall were approaching the bench, Marshall noticed that Hunter, standing off to the side, was sending hand signals to the jurors as they exited the courtroom. Marshall might have thought that Futch was ringmastering a circus rather than presiding over a trial, except that the judge’s attention seemed to be commanded solely by cedar sticks while his longtime friend, the state attorney, committed one improper offense after another. Futch did pause in his whittlin’ to deny Akerman’s motion for a mistrial on grounds of the state’s “technicality” remark. Then he denied the defense request that the remark be stricken from the record. Then he had the jury brought back.
    Hunter resumed. He recalled for the jury the testimony of Herman Bennett, “who sat here and told you for over thirty minutes what a wonderful man he was. It was awfully funny to me. He struck me as being afraid that Hoover was going to call him up to take over Hoover’s job.” Having subjected the criminologist’s testimony again to ridicule, Hunter elevated the reputation of James Yates by personally vouching for the deputy sheriff’s honesty, so that he, the state attorney, could not “believe that you gentlemen for one instant believe that any man in a responsible position like that, of a deputy sheriff, would try in any way to fake tracks on anybody. I don’t believe that you gentlemen believe that any such foolishness took place.”
    Hunter tightened his bond with the jurymen by offering them a joke, in dialect, about “two colored men walking down the street,” and after that bit of cracker humor he opened the cracker soul of the case. “Here is this young girl, Norma Padgett,” Hunter said. “You saw her here on the stand. She was an honest old cracker girl, born and raised up in Lake County, Florida. She was a poor honest girl and had never even probably been out of Lake County and had never been in any trouble in her life. . . . She was just an old common Florida country girl, and came from an old common Florida family, and I ask you which are you going to believe?”
    As he described