The final version of the state budget plan that legislative leaders announced on Tuesday includes $4 million in compensation for the relatives of the Groveland Four.
State House and Senate officials spent the weekend hashing out the differences between their two budget proposals.
Along the way, they revived the funding for the descendants of the Groveland Four, which found unanimous support in the Senate during the regular session earlier this year but failed to get traction in the House.
The budget now is in a mandatory 72-hour “cooldown period” where it is available to the public to review before lawmakers vote on it on Friday.
‘A gross injustice’
The Groveland Four refers to four young Black men — Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, Samuel Shepherd, and Ernest Thomas — who were wrongly prosecuted or killed for the alleged rape of a white woman in Lake County in 1949.
Thomas, while fleeing a posse led county sheriff Willis McCall, was shot 400 times, while the rest were arrested, according to a legislative analysis of the repayment bill. Greenlee, who was 16 at the time, was given a life sentence because he was a minor, while Shepherd and Irvin were sentenced to death.
McCall attempted to coerce confessions with violence, covered up exonerating evidence and lied under oath during the trial, according to State Attorney Bill Gladson.
Future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, then an attorney for the NAACP, overturned their convictions by appealing them to the Supreme Court.
But in 1951, while transporting Irvin and Shepherd back to Lake County for a subsequent pretrial hearing, McCall shot and killed Shepherd and wounded Irvin, claiming that he acted in self-defense.
Irvin was again convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death, though the sentence eventually was commuted to a life sentence. He was paroled in 1968 and died two years later.
Greenlee was paroled in 1962 and died 50 years later, at 78.
Over the past decade, Florida has recognized the injustices they faced. The Legislature formally apologized in 2017, calling the four “victims of a gross injustice.” Gov. Ron DeSantis pardoned them in 2019.
And in 2021, a Lake County judge posthumously cleared them of wrongdoing.
Compensation
In December, Ocoee Democratic Sen. LaVon Bracy Davis filed Senate Bill 694, which would allow the state to pay a to-be-determined sum to the estates of the Groveland Four.
“The family members talked through to me about how they have never received any compensation, and we understand that we can't bring people back from the dead, but what the law allows is compensation,” she explained in an interview on Tuesday.
During the session, lawmakers settled on $4 million, to be split evenly among the estates.
“If they asked me, I would have said quadruple that — but I am satisfied because I don't think it's about the money, it's about acknowledging that the state of Florida participated in this wrongful incarceration, this wrongful death,” she said.
Bracy Davis dedicated the bill to the late Sen. Geraldine Thompson, a mentor and close family friend who started the push to recognize the Groveland Four.
With the funding included in the final version of the budget, the Legislature won’t be able to remove it when the legislation comes to a vote on Friday.
After that, the only avenue for the funding to be removed would be for Gov. Ron DeSantis to veto it.
Bracy Davis hopes that he leaves it intact, because he “did do the posthumous pardon, so one would think that the governor would be in full agreement, because he did realize and recognize that what has happened to this man is a tragedy and travesty.”
