ORLANDO, Fla. — A judge Monday restored the constitutional right to “presumption of innocence” for the Groveland Four, granting a prosecutor’s motion to throw out indictments and convictions that ruined the lives of the four Black men accused seven decades ago of raping a 17-year-old white girl.
Calling it an “unimaginable privilege,” Circuit Judge Heidi Davis cleared the names of Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd and Ernest Thomas, all now dead, to correct one of Florida’s greatest miscarriages of justice from the Jim Crow era.
“This is a glory hallelujah day,” said Shepherd’s cousin, Beverly Robinson, at a news conference afterward.
