Beneath a Ruthless Sun Read online

  At the hearing’s end, when Futch had left the chambers, Pearl rushed toward Jesse in the hope of offering him some comfort, but McCall efficiently blocked her. Then he hustled Jesse into the hallway and back up to the jail.

  Still, even the sheriff could not quell the Danielses’ optimism when they left the court. Finally, a lawyer would be fighting on behalf of their son. Mabel, however, was furious. She headed straight for her office and typed a letter to Futch. In it, she invoked, among other contentious cases in which they had been involved over the years, the Groveland and Platt cases and the memory of their late mutual friend Jesse Hunter:

  Dear Judge Futch,

  One of the cardinal rules of newspaper work drilled into me as a “cub” reporter was: “Be sure you are right, then go ahead.” Since we all know it is most often difficult determining “beyond a reasonable doubt” what is absolutely right, I have made my own maxim. It is, “Be on the side of right, then go ahead.”

  This was my motivation in the Platt case; it is the rule I try earnestly to follow as best my conscience can direct me in all matters. That is why I remain poor, I guess.

  I certainly did not relish the idea of so soon having another Platt case. I would prefer to coast awhile. However, my interest in law and justice is deep-rooted, and it certainly did not die when I was involved in such [matters] as . . . the harassment of defenseless people. Nor could it die when I felt another was working even harder than I to uphold justice and to be on the side of right. I am most regretful now that the one who so helped me in that case—and so polished the armor of justice—is not here now to assist me.

  Your comments in the courtroom this morning cannot be interpreted any other way than as a slap at me. But believe me, I am not angered over it, unjust as it was in light of the Platt case defense, and in light of my statement to you last Friday that I did not get the mother to write to the governor. I knew only that she said she “thought” she would write the governor. I did not urge her to do so, I did not ask for a copy. I knew nothing of it until the copy came to me in the mail.

  I treated it as the news it was.

  As for other advice to the family, I have given them none concerning your court other than to say I felt they must trust you. I was gratified then this morning when I heard Mrs. Daniels say to you, “We trust you.”

  I do too.

  Cordially,

  Mabel Norris Reese

  Mabel soon had reason to think that her trust might have been misplaced. Within days, Futch announced that he was appointing the highly experienced criminal attorney Archie Patterson “Sam” Buie as counsel for Jesse Daniels. A graduate of the University of Florida, Buie had attained some celebrity as the star end on the football team, which he captained in the 1912–1913 season—the first full season that the team took to the field as the Florida Gators. He had begun his law career as a prosecutor after serving in the National Guard during World War I. He had been elected to the office of state attorney for the Fifth Judicial Circuit, then briefly served in the state assembly before returning to his prosecutorial roots. He had been Jesse Hunter’s assistant until 1952 and had replaced Hunter as state attorney upon his retirement. Buie’s relationship with Hunter had ended badly, though. As assistant prosecutor in the Groveland case, he had taken issue with Hunter’s budding friendship with Mabel, especially when Hunter, like Mabel, turned on McCall for shooting the prisoners. (Buie, like Troy Hall, had helped the sheriff with his statement to the FBI, claiming the shooting was in self-defense.) The rift had widened further when Hunter, having by then retired, wrote to Collins to express his change of heart regarding Walter Irvin’s guilt. When the letter was made public, Buie, then state attorney, wrote a letter of his own, urging the governor to issue Irvin’s death warrant and “get rid of this case once and for all.” To sully Hunter’s reputation, Buie conveyed to an NAACP official in Ocala a scandalous tale that implicated Hunter in a conspiracy with McCall to execute the two Groveland Boys, but when the story reached Thurgood Marshall, he recognized it for what it was: Buie’s attempt to smear Hunter at McCall’s bidding.

  The last major case of Sam Buie’s prosecutorial career had been eerily reminiscent of the Emmett Till lynching the year before. On October 27, 1956, Jesse Woods, a thirty-nine-year-old farm laborer and a GI, was standing outside an A&P grocery store in Wildwood, a dozen or so miles west of Leesburg in Sumter County, when he allegedly called out, “Hello, baby,” to a white schoolteacher. He was arrested on a drunk-and-disorderly charge. Later that evening, he disappeared from his cell. A broken lock on the front door of the unattended jail, an overturned bunk, and a trail of blood indicated that a mob had carried him off, but the Sumter County sheriff claimed he had “not a lead in the world” to begin an investigation. Many feared the incident would meet, as the St. Petersburg Times observed, “the dead-end fate of the Mississippi Till case.”

  “I believe they done killed him up,” said the seventy-one-year-old father of Jesse Woods. A few days later, bloody clothing belonging to Woods was discovered in a field, and investigators from the Florida Sheriffs Bureau began dragging Lake Deacon for a body, to no avail. FBI agents soon arrived, but they, like local law enforcement, made little progress. Ignoring the advice to “stay out of the little towns,” Robert Saunders from the NAACP in Tampa arrived to a “chilling” atmosphere in Wildwood, where the streets were deserted and local blacks were terrified of talking to authorities. Winning the community’s trust, Saunders was led to a fishing camp in the Panhandle where he’d been told Jesse Woods could be found. Relatives at the camp confirmed that a mob of shotgun-toting young white men had abducted Woods from the Wildwood jail, forced him into a car, and driven him to a wooded area, where they’d severely beaten him and left him for dead. Woods, however, had regained consciousness, and, after hiding in a sugarcane patch, he managed to crawl to the edge of a dirt road, where, in a stroke of good fortune, he was discovered by his uncle on his way to work. The uncle rolled Woods into a rug, put him in the back of the car, and drove him north to a house where he could safely recuperate. By the time Saunders arrived there, Woods had been moved to a still more remote location in Alabama, just above the Florida state line.

  Saunders notified the FBI, which placed Woods into protective custody in the state prison at Raiford. Woods claimed that he’d never said anything to the schoolteacher. Nor did he recognize his assailants, he said, as he had been ordered to keep his head down during the entire ordeal. Within days, the Florida Sheriffs Bureau, with assistance from the FBI, cracked the case, and arrested nine men for the abduction and beating of Jesse Woods. All nine pleaded not guilty, and a trial date for what became known as the “Hello Baby” case was set, with Truman Futch presiding, Sam Buie leading the prosecution, and George Scofield representing the accused. However, key witnesses, despite their previous statements identifying the abductors, were reluctant to repeat their testimony on the stand. Buie claimed ignorance as to why the witnesses had changed their story, then refused to allow a statement that the Sheriffs Bureau had taken from a defendant who had admitted to being present at the abduction; the case collapsed. Futch directed the all-white jury to acquit all of the defendants, declaring that the state “had failed to present sufficient evidence for conviction.” He was careful, though, not to cast aspersions on Buie, as he might be accused of protecting young white citizens who had “never been in trouble before” by failing to fight for their convictions. In fact, Futch told the jury, he had never seen a case “where a state’s attorney worked harder, more sincerely, and at the same time under greater difficulties and against greater odds.” Instead, Futch placed the blame on the Florida Sheriffs Bureau, stating there had been “no excuse for them to move in and take over the case,” rather than assist the Sumter County sheriff. The defendants shook hands with the jurors, then posed, smiling, for a picture in the courtroom. They told reporters they intended to seek an apology from the bureau.

  Aft
er Buie had served out his term as state attorney, he announced his upcoming retirement and in effect passed the prosecutor’s baton to Oldham, who was elected state attorney in 1956. Buie had barely begun his retirement when he received a telephone call from Futch asking him to take on one last case.

  On January 26, Buie drove from his home in nearby Ocala to the courthouse in Tavares, there to assume his entirely new role as public defender. Oldham briefed his friend and former boss on the case, and McCall supplied him with a copy of Jesse’s confession. Buie was then escorted up to the juvenile ward.

  The first words he spoke to Jesse were: “Why’d you do it, boy?”

  “I’m not guilty!” Jesse stammered.

  “You have to be guilty,” Buie said. “You confessed, didn’t you?”

  Buie introduced himself to Pearl and Charles. He promised them that he would spare Jesse the electric chair—never mind that rape in Florida was a capital crime carrying a mandatory death sentence. He spoke confidently of his long relationships with Oldham and Futch. He confided that in court he would often “signal” to the judge the outcome he desired. “Not one of my clients has burned yet,” Buie said. “We may get this one off with life.”

  It did not then occur to the Danielses that all of Buie’s experience as state attorney was prosecutorial and that his reputation in capital cases had been built on sending defendants to the electric chair. Still, Pearl did not lose hope that their court-appointed attorney would somehow rectify the court’s colossal mistake. She and Charles resolved to put their trust in Sam Buie. They had no other choice.

  Three days later, Futch ordered McCall to have Jesse Daniels transported to the State Hospital for the Insane at Chattahoochee, where he was to undergo evaluation by two “disinterested qualified experts,” Dr. J. T. Benbow and Dr. J. B. O’Connor. Citing “reasonable ground to believe that the defendant is insane,” Futch ordered that Jesse be detained there for observation “until such time as said experts shall determine said defendant’s mental condition and notify this Court of their findings.”

  If Sam Buie’s initial tack as defense counsel for Jesse Daniels was perplexing—to confront the boy with his alleged confession, then to assure the parents he could spare their son the electric chair by negotiating a life sentence—Buie’s next move was beyond puzzling. In a letter to the two doctors at Chattahoochee, Buie in essence framed the case against his client by gently affirming his expectation that Jesse Daniels be found insane and held indefinitely at the hospital. Having been imposed upon by their “mutual friend,” Buie humbly acknowledged that he was now in turn “imposing on two of my mutual friends, you two gentlemen.” Then he told them why: “I know that you will not turn us down.”

  Buie informed the psychiatrists that he had found Jesse to possess the mental functioning of a six-year-old. And while he did not believe Jesse was insane “in the strict sense of the word,” he did consider him so “within the meaning of the statute,” and added that he therefore could not see how Jesse could advise, consult, or assist in the preparation of his defense.

  With the letter, Buie enclosed a copy of Jesse’s alleged confession. Although he acknowledged that his client denied his guilt, he declared that he himself had no doubt that Jesse was the perpetrator, citing the confession’s inclusion of details that no one else could have known, “even to the part where he stated his penis went down and he had to get off and get it upright and start again.”

  In closing, Buie commended the physicians on their expertise and emphasized that the court had set no deadline for their report or for Jesse’s return. “That was done possibly to give you as much time as you need to determine his condition.”

  At Buie’s request, Pearl sent him a detailed report on Jesse’s medical history to aid in her son’s evaluation, which Buie then forwarded to the doctors. Pearl, too, turned her attention to the hospital, but not simply by mail. On February 16, she and Charles traveled by bus the 250 miles north to the Panhandle, then along the Georgia border to Chattahoochee. From the outside, the hospital seemed peaceful and bucolic. Inside, however, with its big green institutional doors and gray windows with heavy, spring-steel screens that nearly blocked out the light, Chattahoochee looked and sounded like nothing so much as a loud, chaotic state prison.

  The visit with their son was brief, and they were not able to meet Dr. R. C. Eaton, the senior psychiatrist and clinical director. On her return home, Pearl wrote Eaton a letter requesting that Jesse be kept at Chattahoochee “until his trial comes up.” Despite the oppressive atmosphere, “everyone there seem to like the boy and feel he has no business there,” and keeping him there seemed preferable to having him under the watch of Sheriff McCall. She was eager to have Eaton’s report on Jesse’s evaluation. “I know the boy is very slow thinking and acting, and not strong,” Pearl wrote, “but I would like to know your findings which should be more thorough than a mere mother’s. I do know Jesse has always been humble, gentle, and obedient.” She closed her letter to Eaton with a plea for her son’s cause, since she had little doubt that the court, and possibly Buie as well, had provided the doctors at Chattahoochee only with evidence that might support their presumption of Jesse’s guilt. She added, “Jesse said he talked to you about this ‘frame up trouble’ he’s in,” then asked, “Doctor, I want to know from you if you think he has the strength, and clear thinking mind to act quickly enough to carry out such an almost perfect crime as this one? Although we know for certain the boy was with us, at home, and could not have gotten out without us knowing or missing him.”

  A few days later, Pearl received a reply not from Dr. Eaton but from Dr. Benbow, advising her that it might be weeks before Jesse’s evaluations were complete and that the hospital had no power in determining the length of his stay—it would have to abide by the court’s decision. He also advised that any findings or reports would be sent directly to the court; the doctors did not “feel at liberty to express to you our probable opinion regarding his ability to act as charged.” Benbow did, however, inform Pearl that her son was “making a good adjustment . . . and he is eating and sleeping well.”

  Meanwhile, in a letter to Buie, Dr. O’Connor expressed his displeasure at the Danielses’ unexpected visit to Chattahoochee. Buie assured O’Connor that he would advise them not to visit for at least thirty days, and thereafter to request permission for a visit beforehand. He added, “You may rest assured that I will be very happy to give you any further information that I can secure about this boy, who in my opinion, is not even a high type moron.”

  Through all these rebuffs and setbacks, Pearl continued to rely on Mabel, in whom she found sympathy for her plight as a meek but determined woman pitted against powerful adversaries in her fight to save the life of her son. Mabel not only gave voice to Jesse’s quandary through the stories that she published, but also offered genuine friendship. They were an unlikely pair—the sophisticated reporter from the North with her stylish glasses, smart skirts, and fancy necklaces, who had the ear of powerful men like Governor Collins; and the dowdy countrywoman in the faded, secondhand seersucker sundresses, her hair cropped short, her hands callused from toiling in the melon fields, crafting baskets from pine needles, or canning her own fruits and vegetables to feed her family. Still, they joined together to share not just their distaste for Willis McCall and the Lake County justice system but their day-to-day worries and humorous observations about husbands and children and health as well. They began to go fishing together, Pearl taking home whatever bass they caught. And they had a significant trait in common: Neither would back down from a fight.

  In late February, Dr. O’Connor submitted to Judge Futch a long and detailed report on Jesse Daniels. The patient, he noted, was “extremely slow” in his learning ability and showed “much retardation of all his thought processes and conceptual thinking.” While tests scored Jesse’s IQ at “only 60,” the psychiatrist found that his “functional intelligence is on an eve
n lower scale than that.” Jesse had “absolutely no concept of money, and very little understanding of numbers”; he had been unable to do simple calculations involving pennies and nickels. Nor could he name the months of the year in proper sequence. He lacked basic literacy skills, spelling “elephant as ‘lufort,’” and his knowledge of geography, history, and current events was nil.

  O’Connor reported, too, that he had read a copy of Jesse’s confession and, in his opinion, “it would appear that he gave a quite descriptive account of his behavior that night which would indicate that he had performed the act with which he is charged.” O’Connor did note, however, that when he questioned Jesse about the rape, “the patient denied having had anything whatever to do with the act and he would give very circumstantial and often irrelevant rationalizations as to why anyone would think he was connected with it.” The rationalizations, which O’Connor dismissed, deeming them “very shallow,” were Jesse’s claims that he was being blamed for a crime he did not commit. The doctor then asked his subject who he thought might be the guilty party, and Jesse speculated that “perhaps it was a negro” who raped “Mrs. Nowls,” and she was “trying to shield him.” Or perhaps, Jesse conjectured further, it was a white man, and the woman was “trying to protect her husband.” O’Connor determined Jesse’s alternative scenarios to be “obviously defective,” in that the patient was “unable to carry out such thinking to where he would sound plausible to anyone else.” Jesse also told the doctor that he had been out coon hunting with a friend on the night of the crime, and O’Connor noted that Jesse “is at a loss to explain why his colleague has not verified his alibi.” Indeed, Dr. O’Connor wrote, “He seems unable to realize that he must convince others of the reasonableness of his story.”