Florida governor pardons 4 wrongly convicted of rape in 1949

Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, far left, and an unidentified man stand next to Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd, and Charles Greenlee in Florida.
(Image credit: State Library and Archives of Florida)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Friday issued posthumous pardons for the "Groveland Four," four black men — Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd, and Ernest Thomas — who were wrongly convicted of raping a white girl, Norma Padgett, near Orlando in 1949.

"I don't think there's any way that you can look at this case and see justice was carried out," DeSantis said. "For the Groveland Four, the truth was buried. The perpetrators celebrated, but justice has cried out from that day until this." The Florida State House issued an apology to the four men's families in 2017.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Thomas escaped and was murdered after being tracked in a large-scale manhunt. The other three were convicted by all-white juries. Irvin and Shepherd were sentenced to death and Greenlee to life, and a retrial was ordered in 1951. Shepherd was fatally shot by a sheriff who claimed he attempted to escape; Irvin was also shot but survived by pretending to be dead. He said the sheriff attempted to execute the two men by the side of the road while they lay cuffed to each other.

Irvin's death sentence was commuted to life in prison. He was paroled in 1968 and died in 1969. Greenlee was paroled in 1962 and lived until 2012. At Friday's pardon hearing, Padgett continued to insist on the Groveland Four's guilt.

Explore More
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.