In 1949, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd, Walter Irvin, Earnest Thomas, was indicted with the rape of then 17-year-old Norma Padgett after they had allegedly attacked her and her husband in Groveland, Florida.
According to Padgett’s narration, she said that the two of the four men stopped to help while the other two showed up to fight and subsequently committed the sexual assault. While Greenlee, Irvin, and Shepherd got arrested and tortured while in custody. Earnest Thoman was lynched to death by an angry mob lead by Willis McCall, the then-Lake County Sheriff.
As reported by NBCNews, the remaining three of the Groveland Four have died, but Republican Governor Rick DeSantis granted all of them pardon from their alleged crime last year. In a statement said;
During Friday’s event, DeSantis called the conviction of the four a “miscarriage of justice” and that a pardon “brought justice to the historical record.”
Meanwhile, the pardon is welcome, but that is not the chief justice that families are seeking. What they desire is a full exoneration of the Groveland Four because they never committed the crime leveled against in the first place.
On Friday, the four men were given the honor with a memorial monument that spells out their crimes they were erroneously convicted for by the retroactive judgment.
“I think we haven’t reached the end of the road, but we have come a long way,” said Carol Greenlee, the daughter of Charles Greenlee, who was 16 and the youngest of the suspects when an all-white jury sentenced him to life in prison.
“Give me hope that we will make that final push for exoneration,” she added.
This development is a good step in the right direction, but what the aim should be is to finally export these men and give their proper names back while still alive.
