“As this bill moves forward, we vow to work closely with the budget chair to secure compensation that reflects the gravity of this injustice,” Bracy Davis said in the text. “The truth is simple: you cannot put a price on a life, especially when the state was responsible for taking it … [moving forward], the actual dollar amount will be negotiated in committee or during budget conference.”

Young said in the press statement that the legislation is about more than “mere compensation.”

“It’s about accountability, acknowledgment and restoring the dignity that was stolen from these men and their families,” his statement reads. “We cannot undo the pain they endured, but we can affirm today that their lives mattered, their truth mattered and justice delayed will not mean justice denied.” 

On July 16, 1949, Irvin and Shepherd, World War II veterans, stopped to offer assistance to Norma Padgett and her estranged husband whose car had broken down on a rural road in Groveland. Padgett would later claim that four Black men attacked her husband, then abducted her and raped her. 

Padgett’s medical examination and testimony about deputies severely beating Greenlee, Irvin and Shepherd in jail to coerce confessions was suppressed. Greenlee also had an alibi — he was detained by two store night watchmen 20 miles away when the rape was alleged to have taken place. Padgett’s husband’s even stated twice that Greenlee wasn’t there. Even so, an all-white jury still convicted all three. Greenlee was sentenced to life in prison. Irvin and Shepherd were sentenced to death.

Thomas, who like Greenlee, did not know either Irvin or Shepherd and was not in the car when they stopped to help Padgett and her husband, managed to elude arrest by fleeing into the next county. But an armed, deputized mob of 1,000 men found him the following day and shot him before he could be tried.

Irvin and Shepherd's death sentences were appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered a retrial. But during a prisoner transport, Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall pulled off the road, dragged Irvin and Shepherd from the back seat of the car and shot them. He would later claim they attempted to escape and he shot them in self defense. Shepherd died. But Irvin survived. At his new trial, he was again sentenced to death, but the conviction was later commuted to life in prison. 

Greenlee was eventually paroled in 1960, Irvin in 1968. Both are now deceased. 

Padgett never recanted her story. 

After 70 years of advocacy efforts to clear all four men's names by family members, civil rights activists, historians, and politicians, like the late State Sen. Geraldine F. Thompson, the state of Florida began to correct the record. In 2015 and 2016, Thompson filed resolutions requesting a formal apology by the state for the four “victims of racial hatred and their families.” Senate Bill 900 and House Bill 1133, also filed by Thompson, both aimed to establish an educational scholarship program for Greenlee, Irvin, Thomas and Shepherd’s direct descendants and Black residents of Groveland.

In 2017, the Florida Legislature issued a formal apology for the “grave injustices perpetrated" against the men and their families. In 2019, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Cabinet granted posthumous pardons to all four men. But Thompson, working with then-Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, continued to push for full exoneration. “What we want is for them to be acknowledged for their innocence, which is what they deserve,” said Thompson, according to Florida Politics. 

Finally, in 2021, a judge in Lake County vacated the convictions and officially exonerated each man. 

Bracy Davis, who was elected to fill Thompson’s former seat in a special election in September and worked hand-in-glove with the late senator while she was alive, told VoxPopuli that compensation for the families was not something that the two of them had ever discussed. But she added that she “promised to dedicate this session to her, and when I researched all that she had done with this, it was the next logical step. I’m doing what I 100 percent know she would’ve done.”