A judge on Monday officially exonerated four young African American men of the false accusation that they raped a white woman seventy years ago. Administrative Judge Heidi Davis dismissed the indictments of Ernest Thomas and Samuel Shepherd, who were fatally shot by law enforcement, and set aside the convictions and sentences of Charles Greenlee and Walter Irvin. The men known as the Groveland Four, who ranged from 16 to 26 at the time, were accused of raping a woman in the central Florida town of Groveland in 1949.

It all began on July 16, 1949, when a 17-year-old white woman and her estranged husband told the police that after their car broke down in Lake County, Fla., the four men had stopped to provide help, then took the woman from the car and raped her.

A posse shot Ernest Thomas more than 400 times after he fled Lake County. A local sheriff, Willis McCall, fatally shot Shepherd and wounded Irvin in 1951 as he drove them to a second trial after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned their original convictions. Irvin and Shepherd, both World War II veterans, were handcuffed together at the time. McCall claimed they had tried to escape while he was transporting them from Raiford State Prison back to the county seat of Tavares for the new trial. Shepherd died on the spot; Irvin, who pretended to be dead, survived and later told FBI investigators that McCall had shot them in cold blood and that his deputy, James Yates, had also shot him in an attempt to kill him.

Charles Greenlee, who was 16 when he was charged, was the only one to survive past 1969.

Thurgood Marshall Sr., then with the NAACP, represented Irvin during his second trial, but an all-white jury again convicted him and he was sentenced to death. Governor Leroy Collins later commuted Irvin’s sentence to life with parole. Greenlee, also sentenced to life, was paroled in 1962 and died in 2012 at the age of 78. Irvin died in 1969, one year after he was paroled.

An investigator interviewed the grandson of Jesse Hunter, the now-deceased prosecutor of two of the Groveland Four defendants. According to the grandson, Broward Hunter, his grandfather and a judge in the case, knew there was no rape. James Yates, the deputy who served as a primary witness, likely fabricated evidence, including shoe casts.