E X E C U T I V E
D I R E C T O R ’ S
M E S S A G E
J o h n F. K y n e s - H i l l s b o r o u g h C o u n t y B a r A s s o c i a t i o n
2017 Liberty Bell Award Goes to USF’s Erin
Kimmerle; Law Day Luncheon Celebration
Marks End to Banner Year
“As long as the world shall last, there will be wrongs, and if no man
objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.”
—Attorney Clarence Darrow
All the boys who lived at the school called it the “White House.”
It was a small white building on the pastoral grounds of the state-run Dozier
School for Boys in the Florida panhandle town of Marianna.
Tragically, it was inside the White House where, for decades, hundreds of
boys at the reform school, which closed in 2011, would endure severe beatings
and abuse at the hands of the school’s staff.
In recent years, members of a victim’s group called the White House Boys
have come forward and shared stories of physical and sexual abuse, as well as
of suspicious deaths, that occurred while they lived at Dozier.
The details are so horrific the Florida Legislature this past spring felt
compelled to offer a formal apology to the victims and their families, calling
what happened at Dozier, which opened in 1900, a violation of “fundamental
human decency.”
Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran, a Republican from Land O’Lakes,
stated it was “one of blackest moments on our [state’s] history.”
Dr. Erin Kimmerle, a forensic anthropologist from the University of South
Florida, was one of the key figures in the investigation of the school.
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