Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King

Author:Gilbert King
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15: YOU HAVE PISSED IN MY WHISKEY

Sheriff Willis McCall. (Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida)

THURGOOD MARSHALL SENT a twelve-word telegram to Dellia Irvin: “Won new trial for Walter Irvin in Supreme Court of United States.”

On April 9, 1951, exactly one month after they had heard arguments in Shepherd v. Florida, the nine Supreme Court justices handed down a per curiam decision—that is, a decision authored by the Court as a whole rather than by a specific judge—and thus were the convictions of Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin overturned.

It had been Robert Carter’s argument in regard to Lake County’s grand jury selection process that had afforded the grounds for reversal. Justice Robert Jackson wrote a concurring opinion, in which he was joined by Felix Frankfurter, scorching the roles that Judge Truman Futch, State Attorney Jesse Hunter, Sheriff Willis McCall, and even Mabel Norris Reese of the Mount Dora Topic had played in convictions that “do not meet any civilized conception of due process of law.” Justice Jackson pointed to “prejudicial influences outside the courtroom . . . [that] were brought to bear on this jury with such force that the conclusion is inescapable that these defendants were prejudged as guilty, and the trial was but a legal gesture to register a verdict already dictated by the press and the public opinion which it generated.” So it was, Jackson opined, that “[t]he only chance these Negroes had of acquittal would have been in the courage and decency of some sturdy and forthright white person of sufficient standing to face and live down the odium among his white neighbors that such a vote, if required, would have brought.” In the end, the justice accounted the jury selection issue on which the two convictions were overturned to be of “only theoretical importance.” To characterize aptly Florida’s handling of the Groveland Boys case required, for Justice Jackson, stronger language than that offered by counsel or by the precedent cited in Cassell v. Texas; and in a stinging conclusion, he provided it: “The case presents one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice. It is on that ground that I would reverse.”

With those two sentences Justice Jackson had indicted the legal establishment and law enforcement offices of Lake County. Reporters scurried for comment from county officials. While Judge Truman Futch refused to issue any statement on the Supreme Court’s decision, a justice on the Florida Supreme Court allowed that he was “not surprised” by the ruling. Florida attorney general Richard W. Ervin stated that he was “very disappointed” by the decision, but “the thing to do now is to go ahead and re-try the case as quickly as possible and dispose of it.” Jesse Hunter was less restrained. For months he had been openly critical of the NAACP’s fund-raising efforts to “perfect this appeal,” efforts for which there was “no reason whatever . . . except to pay their lawyers.” Ironically, it had been Hunter’s disingenuous attempt to

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