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

outraged—did this country lawyer honestly think Akerman would waltz into the state attorney’s office with three black men who were facing the death penalty for raping a white woman, as if they were out on bail?—Williams responded with cold civility, “We are not the defendants. I am an attorney from New York and this is Horace Hill.”
    After a grunt, Hunter smiled and, with a nod of acknowledgment, said, “Well, come on in and have a Coke with me.”
    For Williams, that brief exchange between him and Hunter on their first meeting defined their relationship thereafter. “It was very clear to me that he was a sharp character,” Williams recalled, adding that he was “never at ease with Jesse Hunter.” Hunter’s reference to a third defendant may have been merely a momentary lapse of memory, for Hunter had visited all three defendants at Raiford and had more recently questioned them at the arraignment. On the other hand, Hunter’s comment may have been a wily attempt to put the two black attorneys off their mental balance, and thus to gain a psychological advantage over them. One thing was certain: Hunter knew that Franklin Williams would be the first black lawyer ever to be sitting on a legal team in any Lake County courtroom. If Hunter’s aim had been to keep Williams off his balance in relation to the state attorney’s attitudes and intent, he succeeded. “At one moment he [Hunter] would have the most acerbic and bitter racist comment,” Williams noted, “and then the very next moment he would be the most pleasant good fellow, country lawyer you had ever met.”
    On August 25, at the county courthouse in Tavares, the pretrial hearings opened with Judge Truman Futch presiding. They argued motions around a table “in shirt sleeves, drinking cokes and smoking with feet of judge up on the table in front of us,” Williams wrote to the New York office. “All very friendly—while deputies swarm all around the joint!” The defense had no expectations of success, but to establish grounds for appeal, Akerman filed, first, a motion to quash the indictments, citing that at the time the defendants were indicted, “lawless mobs were roaming throughout the County of Lake determined to seek and find your defendants and to then inflict grievous bodily injury upon them. . . .” The motion stated, too, that widely distributed newspapers had published editorials and cartoons “calling for and demanding that the extreme penalty of death be leveled” against the Groveland Boys. “Filed too late,” Futch ruled.
    Akerman then put forth an application for removal of cause for a change of venue, arguing that lynch mob violence, prejudice, and the hostile environment in Lake County would prevent the defendants from receiving a fair trial. With Sheriff McCall and deputies James Yates and Leroy Campbell in attendance, the defense called attention to the apparent “brutal” beatings and abuse “by persons purporting to be law enforcement officials of Lake County.” Futch ruled the support of the motion to be “completely irrelevant and immaterial”; furthermore, Futch announced, he would not permit any testimony regarding its substance during the trial.
    Next, the defense filed a motion for continuance, citing good faith reasons why the trial should be postponed—namely, the inadequate time to properly prepare a defense, especially given the fact that with the defendants more than a hundred miles away at the state prison in Raiford, their meetings with counsel had been “extremely inconvenient and impractical.” Futch considered the motion. Deciding it to be a fair request, he delayed the start of the trial by three days. Jury selection would begin on Thursday, the first of September.
    During the remaining days of pretrial hearings Williams and Akerman hoped both to build a case for the defense and to determine specifics of the case being mounted by the prosecution. They thus filed a bill of particulars, which required Hunter to specify what facts the state of Florida intended to prove with regard to the crimes charged in the indictments. The defense attorneys had made a start, albeit late. It would get later.
    With the pretrial motions under way, the defendants—Irvin, Shepherd, and Greenlee—had been removed again to the jail in Tavares, to the same cells they’d occupied on the fourth floor a month earlier. The bloodstained sheets on the beds had not been changed, as Williams had noticed with