Biography
Wilbert Lee was one of two Black men, with Freddie Lee Pitts, falsely convicted of the August 1963 kidnapping, robbery and murder of two white gas-station attendants in Port St. Joe, Florida. They were convicted with no material evidence, on confessions obtained through beatings and threats, and sentenced to death in 1968; in 1968 a key witness admitted she had lied under police threat. Lee, a pulpwood cutter at whose home Pitts had attended a party that night, confessed after being told his wife would be harmed. After the Florida Supreme Court ordered a new grand jury in 1969 (Black citizens had been excluded), an all-white jury again convicted them in 1972 and they were sentenced to be electrocuted — even though another man, Curtis Adams Jr., had confessed to the killings. They were finally pardoned by Governor Reubin Askew in 1975. Documented in The Black Panther (April 27, 1974).
