State Attorney Gladson corrects the record in ‘The Groveland Four’ case
'There are times, however, when the past merges with the present, and we are forced to confront our sins'
Bill Gladson
Hampered by a lack of evidence, Fifth Circuit State Attorney William Gladson was ready to end an effort to clear the “Groveland Four,” a racially charged, 72-year-old case considered one of Florida’s worst miscarriages of justice.
“I went back to English common law to see if there was a way to challenge this,” Gladson said. “I looked at every writ, the writ of Coram Nobis (“the errors before us”), everything, but there was no procedural mechanism, no way this could be done without new evidence.”
In 2018, then Attorney General Pam Bondi asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to review the case, with the goal of clearing the suspects in a court of law.
The Legislature made a formal apology, and Gov. Ron DeSantis issued posthumous pardons in 2019, but charges were still pending.
The FDLE turned the case over to Gladson in July. Its final report “did not identify or develop any new verifiable and substantial evidence (as per F.S. 961.03) to corroborate or contradict the established information pertaining to the Groveland Four’s innocence or their alleged participation in the incident,” according to court records.
Gladson prepared a memo closing the matter, and notified the suspects’ surviving family members that they could be disappointed.
But before he issued the memo, Gladson asked an investigator to do some additional digging.
Several days later, his phone rang.
“I was driving to Hernando one day, and I got a phone call, and the agent said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, I just spoke with the Lake County clerk’s evidence person, and he said they’ve got the evidence from the 1949 through 1951 trial in a vault,’” Gladson said. “And we were both just shocked.”
The evidence had been long overlooked, Gladson said.
“In 1999, the evidence was transferred from Marion County back to Lake County,” he said. “For at least 50 years, people went looking for the evidence in Lake County, and it wasn’t there.”
By October 19, Gladson was able to file a 33-page “Motion to Dismiss Indictments of Earnest Thomas and Samuel Shepherd, Motion to Set Aside Judgment and Sentence of Charles Greenlee and Walter Irvin, and Motion to Correct Record with Newly Discovered Evidence.”
The four Black suspects were wrongly accused of raping a 17-year-old White girl and attacking her husband in Groveland in 1949, after the couple’s car broke down in the dead of night.
Only days after the four suspects were accused, an angry mob of more than 1,000 men hunted down Thomas and killed him, riddling his body with more than 400 bullets.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 1951 unanimously overturned the convictions of Shepherd and Irvin, who were defended by NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, a future U.S. Supreme Court justice.
Former Lake County Sheriff Willis McCaul shot and killed Shepherd and seriously wounded Irvin as they were being transported for a pretrial hearing in November of the same year. McCall claimed they were trying to escape.
Irvin was retried, convicted, and paroled in 1968 — before being found dead a year later under suspicious circumstances.
Greenlee, who did not appeal his conviction to avoid risking a death sentence, was paroled in the 1960s and died in 2012.
The case sparked racial attacks against Black men in Groveland, countless news stories, and decades later, TV shows and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Devil in the Grove,” by Gilbert King.
The newly discovered evidence included a pair of pants that when tested, corroborated other evidence of prosecutorial and police misconduct, Gladson said.
Assisted by the author’s research, Gladson found Broward Hunter, the grandson of Jesse Hunter, the original prosecutor in the case.
In an August 30 sworn statement, Broward Hunter told Gladson and an FDLE investigator that he had found one of his grandfather’s letters while cleaning out a law office.
The letter indicated that by the time of the second trial, Jesse Hunter and the trial judge were convinced that no rape had occurred, Gladson said.
Other evidence suggested that two of the suspects may have been rivals of Sheriff McCall’s in a “bolita” syndicate, or illegal gambling operation, and that McCall would have benefitted from their convictions, Gladson said.
The October 25 motion, which Gladson prepared with the help of homicide prosecutor Kenneth Nunnelley, acknowledges that the convictions were affirmed by the Florida Supreme Court, and that “our judicial system, with good reason, favors finality.”
“There are times, however, when the past merges with the present, and we are forced to confront our sins,” the motion states.
Even a casual review of the record shows that the suspects were denied their fundamental due process rights, and that the sheriff, the judge, and the prosecutor “all but ensured guilty verdicts in this case,” the motion states.
“These officials, disguised as keepers of the peace and masquerading as ministers of justice, disregarded their oaths, and set in motion a series of events that forever destroyed these men, their families, and a community,” the motion states. “I have not witnessed a more complete breakdown of the criminal justice system, nor do I ever expect I will again.”
On November 22, Fifth Circuit Judge Heidi Davis granted the motion.
Carol Greenlee, daughter of Charles Greenlee, was interviewed by a WESH-TV reporter after the hearing.
“I will not hate, but I will love and embrace all of those who did not know at the time that my father was a caring and loving, compassionate person, that did not rape anybody,” she said.
Gladson said he is convinced that a case like the Groveland Four could not occur today.
“I tell people, it was terrible, it was awful, and it was,” he said. “There’s too many guardrails in place right now to prevent anything like this from ever happening.”
