Book Review: How a Racist Sheriff Railroaded a Disabled Teenager and Got Off

The hero of “Devil in the Grove” was a youngish Thurgood Marshall, the cagey grumpus in his days as a crusading lawyer. His counterpart in King’s new book is far less famous but equally compelling. Mabel Norris Reese ran a struggling weekly newspaper in Lake County, and this middle-aged white woman had the courage and fortitude to challenge the authority of Willis McCall. She may have dressed with uncharacteristic fussiness for the flatlands of Central Florida, complete with “her bebopper’s cat-eye glasses,” but not even burning crosses on her lawn (and worse) intimidated her from her pursuit of McCall’s misdeeds. (Watch for a Streep vs. McDormand brawl for the part.) Reese struck up a friendship with Daniels’s beleaguered mother, and the pair did what they could to stop McCall from putting Jesse away.

On the surface, King’s choice of this case as an illustration of a racist system of justice might seem peculiar. After all, this is the story of a crooked Southern sheriff railroading a white man. But as the story unfolds, it exposes the sinister complexity of American racism. Joe Knowles, who was off on a tryst with another woman when his wife was attacked, let the authorities know that it wouldn’t do for Blanche to have been raped by an African-American. The shame for her, and for him, would have been too great. So McCall obliged by manufacturing the case against the hapless Jesse Daniels. But then there’s another twist. A black man named Sam Wiley Odom is arrested for a different rape in a nearby town, and the evidence makes clear that Odom also raped Blanche. So, in an especially macabre development, McCall and his allies hustled to have Odom executed for the second rape before he could be implicated in the first. Odom duly became the last person executed for rape in Florida’s history.

But what of Jesse Daniels? Even by Lake County standards, the case against him was weak, since it was based almost exclusively on his flimsy, and obviously coerced, confession. (Plus, Blanche said her attacker was black.) So McCall contrived to avoid a trial altogether by having Daniels committed to the State Hospital for the Insane at Chattahoochee; there, at the instigation of the sheriff, the doctors found that Daniels’s mental state made him unfit to stand trial. And in that notorious hellhole, Daniels — who was never convicted of anything — rotted away year after year.

The second half of King’s book follows the long, frustrating labors of Reese, Daniels’s mother and a handful of others, including the first African-American special agent of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, to free Daniels. As the 1960s yielded to the 1970s, Florida state government took on a more modern cast, and Gov. Reubin Askew demanded investigations of Sheriff McCall in Lake County. But McCall was repeatedly re-elected, and never convicted of anything. As for Jesse Daniels, he was finally released from Chattahoochee after 14 years, on Dec. 4, 1971. A bill in the Florida Legislature to compensate his mother and him for this extended miscarriage of justice kicked around for months, until it was whittled down to $75,000 for Jesse and nothing at all for his mother. Jesse is still alive today, but he has moved away from Lake County.

King tells this complex story with grace and sensitivity, and his narrative never flags. His mastery of the material is complete, though he can’t quite nail down the most provocative theory about the crime that started it all — that Joe Knowles paid Sam Odom to do away with his wife so that he could marry his mistress. King’s occasional detours into such subjects as the history of the citrus industry and Dr. King’s protests in St. Augustine (where he faced some of the ugliest crowds of his career) are welcome and illuminating. The author presents his tale as one of justice triumphing, of the good guys (and gals) coming out on top, of the arc of the universe bending toward justice. (Our 44th president is also a great fan of that Martin Luther King remark, even if the aftermath to his time in office amounts to a refutation of it.) Perhaps Gilbert King needed a glimmer of hope to sustain him through years of toil on this terrible story. He concludes “Beneath a Ruthless Sun” with a quote from his hero, Mabel Norris Reese. The story, she wrote, “all worked out for the best.” Not hardly, in my book.