Special prosecutor rules and the case of the Groveland Boys

On April 18, the Florida state assembly voted unanimously to formally apologize to the "Groveland Boys" for the injustices inflicted on them in repeated rape charges made against them in 1948. On April 27, the Florida state Senate also voted, unanimously, to formally apologize to the Groveland Boys.

The Groveland Boys were four black men who were accused of raping a 17-year-old white woman. On the morning after the alleged rape, the woman appeared at a gas station, calm and neatly dressed, and asked the attendant for help in finding her husband. She made no mention of any rape, and waited patiently for the station attendant to finish his breakfast, then go get his car, before driving with the woman to look for her husband, never mentioning any assault.

When the woman finally got around to telling other people that she had been raped, she was taken for a medical exam, which found no evidence of any sexual or other type of assault.

One of the Groveland Boys ran from the police. When a posse under the supervision of the local sheriff found him, sleeping slumped against a tree, they killed him with more than 100 bullets.

The remaining three were put on trial. Rape of a white woman by a black man was a capital offence in Florida in 1948, and the prosecution sought the death penalty. One of the boys, only 16 years old, was in police custody at the time of the alleged rape.

Two of the "boys" were veterans who had served in the Pacific Theater of WW II. In 1948, when the case started, they were "boys" only in the sense that in much of the South at the time, any black man, no matter who or what his history, no matter his education or achievement, was routinely dismissed as "boy."

The gas station attendant had been identified by the prosecuting attorney. The prosecutor knew that the attendant would testify that the woman showed no indication of being raped, acted calm and normal the morning after the alleged rape, and said nothing about being raped. The prosecutor did not disclose the gas station attendant's existence to the defendants' trial attorney, or the information he had gathered from the attendant.

The prosecutor knew of the medical exam, and the results showing no evidence of rape. He did not disclose the existence of the medical exam or report to the defendants' attorney. The prosecutor was aware that one defendant would tell his attorney that he was in jail at the time of the alleged rape. So he put on the witness stand a sheriff's deputy who denied the defendant's claim ? a deputy who was later shown to have been involved in the off-the-record beating of each of the defendants. And no jail records were made available to the defense to challenge the deputy's testimony.

The three defendants were convicted of raping a white woman. Two were promptly sentenced to death. The youngest, only 16 years old, "got off" with merely a sentence of life in prison. The Florida Supreme Court found no problems with the trial, and affirmed the verdict. The defendants appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that the trial had been a travesty of justice and that the defendants had been wrongly convicted. The court sent the case back for retrial.

Only one defendant was retried. The one who received a life sentence decided it was better to stay alive than to appeal and risk a new trial in which he might get a death sentence. While transporting the two other prisoners from state prison to the local jail for retrial, the sheriff took the prisoners, shackled together, out of his car and shot both of them. One survived to be retried.

At the retrial, the same prosecutor convinced the same trial judge to exclude the now disclosed medical exam evidence. The defense was now aware of the gas station attendant, and brought him in to testify about dealing with the 'victim' that morning. The same prosecutor, who had taken notes of the gas station attendant's statements back at the time of the original rape claim, slammed the attendant, accusing him of changing his story. As "work product" the prosecutor's original interview notes were not discoverable by the defense attorneys.

Again, the defendant was speedily convicted and sentenced to die. But by this time, a national public outcry over the well-publicized case caused a new Florida governor to commute the sentence to life in prison. He was paroled in 1968, and murdered in 1969 while on a visit to family still living in the town where the rape charge had originally been made.

In 1963, in Brady v. Maryland, the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled that prosecutors have a duty to disclose all potentially exculpatory evidence in a case to the defense. The court felt that a prosecutor's function was to pursue justice ? to convict the guilty, and also to avoid convicting the wrongly accused.

But prosecutors are not promoted for finding evidence that sets accused people free. Conviction statistics, not weighed against conviction merits, lead to career advancement, and to the coveted sinecure of a judicial appointment.

On May 2, the California Supreme Court rejected part of a new ethics rule that would have called for punishment for prosecutors who continue to conceal evidence and hide it from defendants' attorneys. Fifty-four years after Brady, the California Supreme Court acknowledged that prosecutors hiding evidence continues to be a problem.

It doesn't matter whether the court rejected the rule because it felt it was too hard on corrupt prosecutors, or because the court wanted the drafting committee to craft a harsher rule, to finally, perhaps, rein in such prosecutors. What matters is that prosecutors continue to seek convictions, even when they know of exculpatory evidence. And it matters that we do not punish prosecutors when they violate their duties: to defendants, and to the taxpayers who have to pay the price when wrongful convictions are overturned, or when innocent people languish in prison.

It isn't a "justice system" if some of the key players continue to be rewarded for attempting to win convictions, and advance their own careers, when they know there is evidence which might block the convictions, or alter the charges or the ultimate sentences.