Willis V. McCall
Later, experts looked closely at the trial. They found it was full of legal problems. Before the trial, McCall had told journalists that two men had confessed. The journalists wrote about this in their newspapers. One newspaper had a large drawing on the front page. The jury had only white men and not even one black person. The jury quickly convicted all three men. The judge sentenced Shepherd and Irvin to death. Because Greenlee was 16 and not an adult, he was sentenced to life in prison. In 1951, the US Supreme Court overturned Lake County's conviction of Shepherd and Irvin on the grounds that it was not right that there had been no blacks people on the jury. (Most blacks were still disenfranchised by the state constitution and racist laws and rules in the segregated Jim Crow state; because they could not vote, they were not eligible to sit on juries.)