Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

by Gilbert King

Justice Robert Jackson wrote a concurring opinion, in which he was joined by Felix Frankfurter, scorching the roles that Judge Truman Futch, State Attorney Jesse Hunter, Sheriff Willis McCall, and even Mabel Norris Reese of the Mount Dora Topic had played in convictions that “do not meet any civilized conception of due process of law.” Justice Jackson pointed to “prejudicial influences outside the courtroom . . . [that] were brought to bear on this jury with such force that the conclusion is inescapable that these defendants were prejudged as guilty, and the trial was but a legal gesture to register a verdict already dictated by the press and the public opinion which it generated.” So it was, Jackson opined, that “[t]he only chance these Negroes had of acquittal would have been in the courage and decency of some sturdy and forthright white person of sufficient standing to face and live down the odium among his white neighbors that such a vote, if required, would have brought.” In the end, the justice accounted the jury selection issue on which the two convictions were overturned to be of “only theoretical importance.” To characterize aptly Florida’s handling of the Groveland Boys case required, for Justice Jackson, stronger language than that offered by counsel or by the precedent cited in Cassell v. Texas; and in a stinging conclusion, he provided it: “The case presents one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice. It is on that ground that I w...