Walter Woodard

Walter Woodard was one of the four Black Florida defendants sentenced to death on coerced confessions whose case became the landmark Chambers v. Florida. Izell Chambers, Jack Williamson, Charlie Davis and Walter Woodard were among a group of Black men rounded up near Fort Lauderdale, Florida after the 1933 robbery-murder of an elderly white man and sentenced to death on confessions extracted in days of unbroken interrogation. Their appeal, argued by Thurgood Marshall, produced Chambers v. Florida (1940), in which the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the convictions and held that confessions wrung from prisoners by sustained coercion violate due process — a landmark decision.