The Quincy Five were a group of five young African American men from Quincy, Florida, who were charged with the 1970 murder of a Leon County deputy sheriff. The men – Johnny Lee Burns, Alphonso Figgers, Johnny Frederick, Dave Roby Keaton, Jr. and David Charles Smith, Jr. – were convicted but later exonerated.
1974 saw the publication of the book David Charles: The Story of the Quincy Five, authored by Jeffrey Lickson. It included extensive material based on prison interviews with Smith, which focused on his upbringing and experiences as a musician and as a soldier in the Vietnam War. At the time, Smith was serving a Florida prison sentence for setting a bomb at an electrical station in North Florida. He was subsequently sentenced on Federal gun charges and released from Federal Prison on May 28, 1992.