On July 16, 1949, a 17-year-old white woman and her estranged husband reported that she had been abducted at about 2:30 a.m., driven for about 25 minutes to a dead-end road, and raped by four black men. By the end of the night, law enforcement had arrested three young men, Mr. Irvin, Mr. Greenlee, and Mr. Shepherd, who would be severely beaten by the authorities. Mr. Thomas, understanding the racial realities of the time and the danger he was in, fled the country, but a posse of about 1,000 men tracked him down days later in nearby swamps, where he died in a hail of gunfire. N.A.A.C.P. lawyers, including Franklin Williams and Thurgood Marshall, took an active role in the men’s defense. It was clear that at least two men, Mr. Greenlee and Mr. Thomas, were never at the scene of the alleged crime, that the beatings had led to forced confessions, and that important evidence, including a medical examination of the woman, was never presented in court. An all-white jury sentenced Mr. Irvin and Mr. Shepherd to death and Mr. Greenlee to life in prison. Williams and Marshall appealed to the Supreme Court, and the convictions were unanimously overturned in 1951. Sheriff McCall later drove the men to appear in court in Tavares, stopped the car, and shots were fired. He claimed he had stopped to fix a flat tire, that the two men had tried to attack him, and that he had shot them in self-defense. Mr. Irvin survived and said from his hospital bed that after the sheriff shot him twice, deputy Sheriff James L. Yates shot him again in the neck at point-blank range while he lay on the ground. He recovered, was retried, and was again convicted and sentenced to death by another all-white jury. More than a half-century later, after the case had drawn national attention, the State Senate passed a resolution apologizing to the families of four black men who were victims of racial hatred and gross injustices during the era of state sanctioned segregation in the American South.