From Death Row to Freedom: The Struggle for Racial Justice in the Pitts-Lee Case
Phillip A. Hubbart
University Press of Florida
An insider’s account of the case of Freddie 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.
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 “eyewitness” 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.
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.