Senators Back Compensation For ‘Groveland Four’ Families

By The News Service of Florida

A proposal to compensate the families of the “Groveland Four” is headed to the Senate floor, while the House has yet to act on the effort.

The Appropriations Committee on Thursday backed the proposal (SB 694) after $4 million was added to the measure that seeks to compensate the families of Ernest Thomas, Samuel Shepherd, Charles Greenlee and Walter Irvin.

The four African-American men were falsely accused in 1949 of raping a white woman in Lake County in what became one of the most-notorious cases from the state’s Jim Crow era. They were posthumously pardoned in 2019.

“This bill is about justice, not merely remembered as history, but carried forward as responsibility,” said bill sponsor Ocoee Democrat LaVon Bracy Davis.

The money would be divided equally among the families of the four, Bracy Davis said.

The House version of the bill (HB 6523), which doesn’t include a dollar amount, has yet be heard in committee.

Thomas was killed by a posse in Madison County after the rape accusation. The three other men were beaten to coerce confessions before they were convicted by an all-white jury.

Greenlee, at 16, was given a life sentence. Shepherd and Irvin, both U.S. Army veterans, were sentenced to death. Shepherd and Irvin were later shot, with Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall claiming the two handcuffed men tried to flee while being transported to a new trial that had been ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court due to adverse pretrial publicity. Shepherd died, preventing a retrial. Irvin survived but was retried and convicted.

Then-Gov. Leroy Collins commuted Irvin’s sentence to life in prison. Irvin was paroled in 1968 and died a year later. Greenlee, released from prison in the early 1960s, died in 2012.

The case gained renewed attention after a 2013 book about the incident — “Devil in the Grove,” by Gilbert King — was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

In January 2019, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet — at the time Attorney General Ashley Moody, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried and Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis — pardoned the four men.

In 2021, Lake County Circuit Court Administrative Judge Heidi Davis granted a motion that restored the constitutional rights of the four to the “presumption of innocence.” Davis’ action vacated the convictions of Greenlee and Irvin and dismissed the indictments against Thomas and Shepherd.

Norma Padgett Upshaw, who remained adamant that the four men were the ones involved in her assault, died in 2024.

Appearing before DeSantis and the Cabinet in January 2019, Padgett Upshaw told the panel, “I’m begging you not to give them pardons because they done it.”