George Stinney Jr. was just 14 when he was executed in 1944 after a rushed trial. Seventy years later, a judge overturned his conviction over serious constitutional violations.
George Stinney Jr. was executed by electric chair in South Carolina on June 16, 1944, at just 14 years old.
An all-white jury took only 10 minutes to find him guilty of murdering two white girls.
Police claimed he confessed, but no written confession was produced, and his defence lawyer called no witnesses.
In 2014, a judge overturned his conviction, citing fundamental violations of his constitutional rights.
George Stinney Jr. was only 14 years old when he was put to death in an electric chair in South Carolina, United States, after being accused of killing two white girls. Seven decades later, a judge overturned his conviction, ruling that his prosecution had been marred by fundamental violations of his constitutional rights. Stinney, however, had been dead for 70 years and never lived to see the decision.
The case dates back to March 24, 1944, when the bodies of Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, 7, were found in a ditch near Alcolu, a small town in South Carolina. Stinney, a Black boy living in the racially segregated American South, was arrested and accused of killing the girls.
His trial took place on April 24, 1944. The proceedings lasted only a few hours, and an all-white, all-male jury deliberated for just 10 minutes before finding him guilty of murdering Binnicker. He was sentenced to death by electrocution. Less than three months after the girls’ deaths, on June 16, 1944, Stinney was executed. He became the youngest person executed in the United States during the 20th century.
But serious questions surrounded the case. Police claimed Stinney had confessed, yet no written confession was produced. He had been questioned without a parent, guardian or lawyer present. His court-appointed defence lawyer did not call witnesses to support him and conducted little or no cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses, according to accounts of the case and the judge’s later ruling.
14-year-old George Stinney Jr.
Stinney’s family maintained that he was innocent. His sister, Amie Ruffner, later gave an account of the day the girls died, saying they had passed by their home asking about flowers before leaving. She said Stinney was with her tending to the family’s cow around the time of the killings. That account was not presented to the jury during his 1944 trial.
For decades, the conviction remained in place. The case received renewed attention after local historian George Frierson began researching it, eventually joining lawyers who sought to have the conviction overturned. In 2013, a legal motion was filed on Stinney’s behalf, seeking a review of the case that had ended with his execution.
On December 16, 2014, South Carolina Circuit Court Judge Carmen Mullen vacated Stinney’s conviction. She found that his prosecution had been marked by fundamental violations of due process, criticised the inadequate legal representation he received and ruled that the purported confession was inadmissible because it was likely coerced.
The decision came 70 years after his execution. It did not bring Stinney back or give him the chance to live beyond childhood. His conviction was overturned because of the serious constitutional failures in his trial, while his family’s long-held insistence that he was innocent remained central to the case.
For his relatives, the ruling offered long-awaited recognition of the injustice they believed he had suffered. But the decision could not undo what had happened to a 14-year-old boy whose life was taken before he had the chance to grow up.