White woman who wrongfully accused ‘Groveland Four’ of rape in Jim Crow-era South dies at 92
CNN
A White woman who falsely accused four Black men of rape in the Jim Crow-era South in 1949 has died at the age of 92.
A White woman who falsely accused four Black men of rape in the Jim Crow-era South in 1949 has died at the age of 92. Norma Padgett Upshaw claimed the four men – Ernest Thomas, Samuel Shepherd, Charles Greenlee and Walter Irvin – sexually assaulted her in Groveland, Florida, about 30 miles west of Orlando, when she was 17. The group, who came to be called the “Groveland Four,” became the faces of the case considered one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in Jim Crow-era Florida. Padgett Upshaw died of natural causes on July 12 in Taylor County, Georgia, according to records filed at the probate court. The Washington Post was first to report her death. There were doubts about Padgett Upshaw’s testimony from the onset, but in the era of Jim Crow, a jury convicted the men without evidence of a crime. Circuit Court Judge Heidi Davis in Lake County, Florida, granted the state’s motion in November 2021 to posthumously dismiss the indictments against Thomas and Shepherd and vacated the convictions of Greenlee and Irvin. In 2019, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued full posthumous pardons to the Groveland Four. “For seventy years, these four men have had their history wrongly written for crimes they did not commit. As I have said before, while that is a long time to wait, it is never too late to do the right thing,” DeSantis said in the statement at the time.
FBI says it has disrupted major Chinese hacking operation that threatened US critical infrastructure
The FBI has used a court order to seize control of a network of hundreds of thousands of hacked internet routers and other devices that Chinese government-linked hackers were using to threaten critical infrastructure in the US and overseas, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday.
The Federal Reserve is preparing to cut interest rates for the first time in the Biden era after the White House spent the last three years grappling with Americans’ dissatisfaction with the cost of living, raising new questions about the health of the economy and the impact on voters at the ballot box.
Israeli officials notified the US that the country was going to carry out an operation in Lebanon on Tuesday but did not give any details about what they were planning, according to three sources familiar with the matter, including in a call between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant early Tuesday morning.