Vickers Incident
McCall was later indicted by a grand jury for beating and kicking to death a black prisoner named Tommy Vickers in the county jail in April 1972. Governor Reubin Askew suspended McCall during the trial, but McCall was acquitted by an all-white jury in Ocala in neighboring Marion County after a lengthy trial ended with 70 minutes of deliberation. Critics have argued that the all-white jury never seriously considered the charges. Supporters claim that the charges made against McCall were fabricated and based solely on politics. The presiding Federal Judge stated that the charges brought against McCall appeared to have been false.
Read more about this topic: Willis V. Mc Call
Famous quotes containing the word incident:
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)