From Death Row to Freedom: The Struggle for Racial Justice in the Pitts-Lee Case

This
book is an insider's account of the case of Freddie Lee Pitts and Wilbert Lee,
two Black men who were wrongfully charged and convicted of the murder of two
white gas station attendants in Port St. Joe, Florida, in 1963, and sentenced
to death. Phillip Hubbart, a defense lawyer for Pitts and Lee for more than 10
years, examines the crime, the trial, and the appeals with both a keen legal
perspective and an awareness of the endemic racism that pervaded the case and
obstructed justice.

Hubbart
discusses how the case against Pitts and Lee was based entirely on confessions obtained from the defendants and an alleged "eye witness" through
prolonged, violent interrogations and how local authorities repeatedly rejected
later evidence pointing to the real killer, a white man well-known to the Port
St. Joe police. The book follows
the case's tortuous route through the Florida courts to the defendants'
eventual exoneration in 1975 by the Florida governor and cabinet.

From Death Row to Freedom is a thorough
chronicle of deep prejudice in the courts and brutality at the hands of police
during the civil rights era of the
1960s. Hubbart argues that the Pitts-Lee case is a piece of American
history that must be remembered, along
with other similar incidents, in order for the country to make any progress toward racial reconciliation today.

Publication
of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American
Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.