[1] He lost his bid for an eighth term shortly after he had been acquitted of the murder in 1972 of Tommy J. Vickers, a mentally-disabled black prisoner who died in his custody.

In 2007, the Lake County Commission voted unanimously to change a road named in his honor 20 years before because of his history as a "bully lawman whose notorious tenure was marked by charges of racial intolerance, brutality and murder.

"[2] During his 28-year tenure as sheriff, McCall was investigated multiple times for civil rights violations and inmate abuse and was tried for murder but was never convicted.

McCall was first elected as Sheriff of Lake County in 1944 after defeating Emil Yde in the Democratic Party primary.

[7] On July 16, 1949, Norma Padgett, a 17-year-old married white woman in Groveland, Florida, said that she had been raped by four young black men.

As word spread about the alleged rape, an angry crowd of whites gathered at the county jail in Tavares and demanded that McCall turn the suspects over to them for lynching.

He had hidden Shepherd and Irvin in the basement of his Eustis, Florida, home and transferred them to Raiford State Prison for their safety.

Unrest continued, and on the third day, McCall and several prominent businessmen warned the black residents to leave town until things settled, which most did.

US Attorney Herbert Phillips failed to return indictments against Lake County Sheriff's Deputies James Yates and Leroy Campbell for their roles.

In 1951, the US Supreme Court overturned Lake County's conviction of Shepherd and Irvin on the grounds that blacks had been improperly excluded from the jury.

At the hospital, Irvin met with NAACP lawyers, and later told the press that McCall shot him and Shepherd without provocation, as did Yates.

[9] When a Lake County coroner's inquest concluded that McCall had acted in the line of duty, Judge Truman Futch ruled that he saw no need to impanel a grand jury on this incident.

After reviewing the material personally, newly elected governor LeRoy Collins in 1955 commuted Irvin's sentence to life in prison, saying that he did not believe that the state established guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

In the 1940s and the early 1950s, he succeeded in gaining voter registration of tens of thousands of blacks, who had been essentially disfranchised since a new state constitution at the turn of the century.

Following the convictions and sentencing in the Groveland case, he requested for the governor to suspend McCall from office and investigate allegations of prisoner abuse.

Six weeks after calling for McCall's removal, Moore and his wife were killed when a bomb exploded under their bedroom in Mims in Brevard County on Christmas night in 1952.

[10] In 2005, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement began a new investigation of the Moore bombing to include excavation of their home site in a search for new forensic evidence.

On August 16, 2006, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist announced his office had completed its 20-month investigation, which resulted in the naming of four now-dead suspects: Earl Brooklyn, Tillman Belvin, Joseph Cox and Edward Spivey.

[13] McCall was indicted in 1972 for second-degree murder by a state grand jury for the death of Tommy J. Vickers, a mentally-disabled black prisoner who was in his custody.

McCall was said to have bragged that he had been investigated 49 times and that five different governors had tried to remove him:[4] He liked to say "I've been accused of everything but taking a bath and called everything but a child of God.