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

roadbed outside of Okahumpka, at the very spot where Norma Padgett claimed she’d been raped. Using FBI procedures as a guide, Yates had made “plaster Paris casts” to determine the match. He had also made casts of footprints found at the roadside where Willie Padgett claimed to have been beaten and robbed; the footprints proved to be an exact match to Walter Irvin’s shoes. In cross-examination, Akerman questioned Yates’s qualifications as an expert in tire-track and footprint analysis, but the deputy remained confident in his abilities. Yates noted that he must be doing it right because “the sheriff has kept me for 4 years.” It was all the jury needed to hear.
    The sun had set on Tavares, and Judge Futch, who had whittled through the first day of the trial, declared a recess. The jury exited the courtroom with the bailiff, who would, as the judge had instructed, “feed you and sleep you.” Ted Poston rushed to find a phone so that he could call in a story on the day’s proceedings to the news desk at the New York Post . In the stairwell he had to run a gauntlet of deputies and other Lake County men armed and ready to provide security. Before he got to a phone, without any warning or cause he got “jostled by a couple of hoodlums,” as he put it, and one of them “accidentally” stepped on his eyeglasses. Poston hadn’t brought a second pair.
    The trial resumed at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, September 3, and Jesse Hunter had some cleaning up to do. He first called Groveland bootlegger and bolita dealer Henry Singleton to the stand. On the night of July 15, Singleton claimed, a young man whom he recognized to be Charles Greenlee showed up at his house, supposedly to buy some numbers for a Cuba game. Singleton was suspicious, he told Hunter. Nearly certain that Greenlee was casing his home in order to come back and rob him, Singleton chased the boy off, and shortly thereafter he himself went out for a drive. That’s when he had by chance run into Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin was with him. So it was that Henry Singleton had, in rather a bland narrative, put all three defendants in Groveland in the early evening of July 15. He had also put himself, and the sheriff, back in control of the county’s bolita business. It was Hunter’s next witness who put the now-deceased Ernest Thomas in Groveland on the fifteenth. His mother, Ethel Thomas, who had been in the lockup during the days preceding the trial and had no doubt had time to contemplate the future of her business, the Blue Flame, had decided to cooperate with the sheriff and state attorney. She testified that her son had gone to a party in town that evening.
    Proceeding toward the close of the prosecution’s case, Hunter introduced the state’s last piece of evidence: a July 1949 almanac, by which he showed the jury that the moon had risen at 10:36 p.m. on the fifteenth day of the month and argued that, therefore, the sky was bright enough for Willie and Norma Padgett to easily identify their attackers. Akerman objected on the grounds that the evidence was irrelevant, since the almanac indicated only that the moon rose at 10:36 p.m. in St. Louis, Missouri. The defense might have enjoyed the moment if the judge, whittling at a cedar stick, had not responded, “Objection is overruled.”
    So confident of his case was Hunter by this point that he abstained from calling his remaining witnesses. “I see no purpose in introducing them,” he said. “Therefore, the State rests.” Futch called a recess until 1:30 p.m. that afternoon, and Williams and Akerman decided they’d try to clear their heads and review their strategy in the Florida air.
    Just outside the courtroom, the defense attorneys, exhausted by work and nerves, encountered an overly friendly clerk, who asked, “Well, Mr. Williams, how do you like the way the trial is going?” The ill-timed question received an unconsidered reply. “It’s the worst framed-up case I have ever seen in my years of practice!” Williams snapped.
    Williams later elaborated on the frame. “It was like a story,” he said. “Like a Hollywood story. They had it down pat. They had Irvin’s shoe prints. Imagine making a cast at the scene of the crime. That only happens in movies. You know, of course [they] could make a cast. They had taken his shoes when they arrested him. They had the handkerchief that belonged to either Irvin or Shepherd which they claimed they had tied over their license plate to hide