Florida clemency board grants pardons to Groveland Four

Source: The Guardian

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.

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.

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Richard Luscombe in Miami
Fri 11 Jan 2019 16.33 GMT


Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/11/groveland-four-case-pardons-ron-desantis