User:Ian m/far

In 1949, the Groveland Four were accused of raping a woman and assaulting her husband. One of the accused, Ernest Thomas, was hunted down by a posse of 1,000 men and shot 400 times when he was found. Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin were caught and beaten to force a confession. They were tried and found guilty by an all-white jury; two were sentenced to death and one was sentence to life in prison because he was a minor. Later, two of them were shot and one killed when, according to the Sheriff, they tried to escape while being transported between prisons. All four were exonerated in 2017 by the Florida House of Representatives and pardoned in 2019 by Florida Governor DeSantis.