Ron DeSantis fulfilled campaign promise to prioritise case of black men who were wrongly punished for 1949 rape of a white teen

Florida’s new governor and cabinet confronted the state’s racist past on Friday as they granted pardons to four young black men who were tortured, murdered or wrongly imprisoned for the 1949 rape of a white teenager.

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The case of the “Groveland Four”, the last of whom died in 2012, is widely considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice from an era of racial violence and discrimination in the state.

Following the alleged attack – that many now doubt even took place – one of the Groveland Four was chased and killed by a posse and two were shot, one fatally, by a segregationist white sheriff. The two survivors were convicted on scant evidence by all-white juries and sentenced to death or life imprisonment.

Until now, Florida’s executive clemency board, the state’s only body with pardon-granting authority, had refused to address the Groveland case, despite a decades-long fight by the men’s relatives and supporters to clear their names.

Not even a “heartfelt” 2017 apology from the Florida legislature and an impassioned plea for justice in Congress last year by Senator Marco Rubio was enough to sway the outgoing governor, Rick Scott, to initiate the pardon process.

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But on Friday in Tallahassee, barely 72 hours after his inauguration, the new Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, convened his first meeting of the clemency board and fulfilled a campaign promise to prioritise the case of the four, who he said were “wrongly written into Florida history for crimes they did not commit and punishments they did not deserve”.

“Make no mistake, these men were victims,” DeSantis said in a statement in which he praised the tenacity of the campaigners. “Seventy years is a long time to wait, but it is never too late to do the right thing. Though these men now lie in their graves, their stories linger in search of justice.”

Friday’s discussions were originally indicated to be preliminary in nature, intended to allow the board, consisting of DeSantis, the new attorney general, Ashley Moody, chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, and agricultural commissioner, Nikki Fried, Florida’s only statewide-elected Democrat, to “get a handle” on the case and plot a timeline.

But all four cabinet members were believed keen to push the process forward and the pardons were duly announced.

The Groveland case had looked likely to be consigned to Florida’s forgotten history until the publication of Devil in the Grove, which won a Pulitzer prize in 2013 for its author, historian Gilbert King.

The book, which focused on the role in the case of Thurgood Marshall, then a lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and later a US supreme court justice, also presented evidence that the girl made up the story of the attack.

The alleged victim, Norma Padgett, then 17, and her husband Willie, 22, who had a reputation as a violent drunk, claimed they were approached by the four men on a rural highway in July 1949, after their car broke down as they returned home from a night out. They insisted that Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, both 22 and army veterans from the second world war, together with Ernest Thomas, 26, and Charles Greenlee, 16, confronted them, robbed Padgett of his wallet and took his wife off in their car, raping her on the back seat.

When the Padgetts reported the alleged attack, Shepherd and Irvin were quickly picked up by the Lake county sheriff, Willis McCall, and beaten by officers. Greenlee, who insisted he had never met Shepherd or Irvin, was arrested later and tortured in a police station basement until he confessed.

Thomas escaped after hearing his friend Greenlee had been arrested. A posse appointed by McCall tracked him to Madison county, almost 200 miles away, three days later and shot him dead, a murder later ruled a “justifiable homicide” by a coroner.

McCall’s involvement did not end with Thomas’s killing. After the US supreme court ordered a retrial for Shepherd and Irvin in 1951, McCall chose to drive alone to collect them from the state prison. He stopped his car on a remote road and shot the pair, who were handcuffed together. Irvin survived by playing dead, and claimed after his recovery that McCall shot them in cold blood. However, an all-white coroner’s jury in Lake county, consisting largely of McCall’s friends, according to King’s book, took fewer than 30 minutes to endorse the sheriff’s account that the restrained pair attacked him.

Irvin was convicted and sentenced to death at his second trial before his sentence was commuted to life in 1955. He died in 1969, a year after he was paroled. Greenlee was released in 1962 after serving more than 12 years in prison. He died in 2012.

Chris Hand, a Jacksonville-based attorney who is an adviser to Fried, and who helped form a bipartisan coalition of politicians, lawyers and activists seeking a pardon for the four, said: “It’s hard to move forward with the future of state until you’ve recognised and rectified the mistakes of the past.”