Four Black men have posthumously been exonerated of raping a White woman in 1949 on Monday. Samuel Shepherd, Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, and Walter Irvin were accused of raping the woman in Groveland, Florida, and became known as the “Groveland Four.” Administrative Judge Heidi Davis dismissed the indictments of Thomas and Shepherd and set aside the convictions and sentences of Greenlee and Irvin. The woman, then aged 17, and her estranged husband had told local police that the men raped her on the pretext of helping her when her car broke down.

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Three of the men, who were then aged between 16 and 26, were tortured until the police could extract a confession from two of them, CNN reported.

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The state of Florida officially apologized to their families in 2017, following a resolution passed by the Florida House Representatives against the “great injustice.”

“Despite a lack of evidence or credible witnesses, the four men were charged with rape,” it said.

The four men were also pardoned by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2019.

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Thomas was killed by a mob that shot him more than 400 times shortly after the rape accusation. The local sheriff, Willis McCall, fatally shot Shepherd and wounded Irvin in 1951 as he drove them to a second trial after the US Supreme Court overturned their original convictions due to lack of evidence.

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The sheriff claimed the men tried to escape, but Irvin said McCall and his deputy shot them in cold blood.

Irvin, whose death sentence was commuted to life in prison, died in 1969. Greenlee also died in 2012 while serving life in prison.

The Groveland Four’s families said they hoped their exoneration will lead to reexamination of other convictions of Black men and women during the ‘Jim Crow’ era, marked by racial segregation laws in southern United States.

(With AP inputs)