George Stinney
George Junius Stinney Jr. was an African American boy who was wrongfully executed at the age of 14 after being convicted, during an unfair trial, for the murders of two white girls – 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker and 8-year-old Mary Emma Thames – in his hometown of Alcolu, South Carolina. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death on a single day in April 1944 and then executed by electric chair on June 16, 1944, after Governor Olin D. Johnston refused to grant him clemency.
A re-examination of Stinney's case began in 2004, and several individuals and the Northeastern University School of Law sought a judicial review. Stinney's murder conviction was vacated in 2014, with a South Carolina court ruling that he had not received a fair trial, and was thus wrongfully executed. Stinney is the youngest American with an exact birth date confirmed to be both sentenced to death and executed in the 20th century.
Background
In 1944, George Stinney stood 5 feet 1 inch, and weighed 90–95 pounds. He lived in a small home with a chicken coop in his hometown of Alcolu, South Carolina, with his father, George Junius Stinney, mother Aimé Brown Stinney, brother Charles Stinney, 12, and sisters Katherine Stinney, 10, and Aimé Stinney Ruffner, 7. Stinney's father worked at the town's sawmill, and the family resided in company housing. Alcolu was a small, working-class mill town. White and black neighborhoods were separated by railroad tracks, which was common for small Southern towns of the time. Given segregated schools and churches for white and black residents, there was limited interaction between them.On March 23, 1944, the bodies of Betty June Binnicker and Mary Emma Thames were found in a ditch on the African-American side of Alcolu after the girls failed to return home the night before. Stinney's father assisted in the search. The girls had been beaten with a weapon, variously reported as a piece of blunt metal or a railroad spike. Binnicker and Thames both suffered severe blunt force trauma, resulting in penetration of both girls' skulls. According to a report by the medical examiner, these wounds had been "inflicted by a blunt instrument with a round head, about the size of a hammer." The medical examiner reported no evidence of sexual assault to the younger girl, though the genitalia of the older girl were slightly bruised.
The girls were last seen riding their bicycles looking for flowers. As they passed the Stinneys' property, they stopped to ask Stinney and his sister, Aimé, if they knew where to find "maypops", a local name for passionflowers. According to Aimé, she was with Stinney at the time the police later established the murders occurred. According to an article reported by the wire services on March 24, 1944, the sheriff announced the arrest of "George Junius" and stated that the boy had confessed and led officers to "a hidden piece of iron."
Investigation
George and his older half-brother John were arrested on suspicion of murdering the girls. John was released by police, but George was held in custody. He was not allowed to see his parents until after his trial and conviction. According to a handwritten statement, his arresting officer was H.S. Newman, a Clarendon County deputy, who stated, "I arrested a boy by the name of George Stinney. He then made a confession and told me where to find a piece of iron, about 15 inches where he said he put it in a ditch about six feet from the bicycle."In 1995, Stinney's seventh-grade teacher, W.L. Hamilton—a black man—spoke in an interview with The Sumter Item about George. Hamilton recounted, "I remember the day he killed those children, he got into a fight with a girl at school who was his neighbor. In those days you didn't have to worry about children carrying guns and knives to school, but George carried a little knife and he scratched this child with his knife. I took him outside and we went for a little walk, and I talked to him. We went back into the school, in a submissive way, he begged for the child's pardon." Stinney's sister, Aimé Ruffner, denied those allegations and contacted Hamilton after it was published. Aimé stated, "I asked him why he would say something like that," she said. "He told me someone paid him to say it. I don't know who paid him but his exact words were, 'because they paid me. Hamilton died shortly after his interview was published.
Following Stinney's arrest, his father was fired from his job at the local sawmill and the Stinney family had to immediately vacate their company housing. The family feared for their safety. Stinney's parents did not see him again before the trial. He had no support during his 81-day confinement and trial; he was detained at a jail in Columbia, from Alcolu, due to the risk of lynching. Stinney was interrogated alone, without a counsel or even his parents. Although the Sixth Amendment guarantees legal counsel, this was not routinely observed until the United States Supreme Court's 1963 ruling in Gideon v. Wainwright that explicitly required representation through the course of criminal proceedings.
Trial
The entire proceeding against George Stinney, including jury selection, took place on April 24, 1944. Stinney's court-appointed counsel was Charles Plowden, a tax commissioner campaigning for election to local office. Plowden did not challenge the three police officers who testified that Stinney confessed to the two murders, nor did he try to defend Stinney. He also did not challenge the prosecution's presentation of two differing versions of Stinney's verbal confession. In one version, Stinney was attacked by the girls after he tried to help one girl who had fallen in the ditch, and he killed them in self defense. In the other version, he had followed the girls, first attacking Mary Emma and then Betty June. There is no written record of Stinney's confession apart from Deputy Newman's statement.Other than the testimony of the three police officers, at trial prosecutors called three witnesses: Reverend Francis Batson, who discovered the bodies of the two girls, and the two doctors who performed the post-mortem examination. The court allowed discussion of the "possibility" of rape due to bruising on Binnicker's genitalia. Stinney's counsel did not call any witnesses, did not cross-examine witnesses, and offered little or no defense. The trial presentation lasted two and a half hours.
More than 1,000 white Americans crowded the courtroom, but no black Americans were allowed. As was typical at the time, Stinney was tried before an all-white jury. After deliberating for less than ten minutes, the jury found Stinney guilty of murder. Judge Philip H. Stoll sentenced Stinney to death by electrocution. There is no transcript of the trial and no appeal was filed by Stinney's counsel.
Stinney's family, churches, and the NAACP appealed to Governor Olin D. Johnston for clemency, given the age of the boy. Most of the pleas for clemency came from white women living in South Carolina. Some pleas from whites came with affirmations of white supremacy, but disgust over the prospect of someone so young being executed. Others urged the governor to let the execution proceed, which he did. He visited George Stinney in the Death House two days before his execution, on June 14. Johnston wrote a response to one appeal for clemency, stating, "I have just talked with the officer who made the arrest in this case. It may be interesting for you to know that Stinney killed the smaller girl to rape the larger one. Then he killed the larger girl and raped her dead body. Twenty minutes later he returned and attempted to rape her again but her body was too cold. All of this he admitted himself." It was reported that these were merely rumors, and Johnston's claims were not corroborated by the girls' autopsies.
Between the time of Stinney's arrest and his execution, his parents were allowed to see him once after the trial, when he was held in the Columbia penitentiary. Under the threat of lynching, they were not allowed to see him any other time.
An execution of a child as young as 14 was virtually unheard of in United States history, even for black children in the Jim Crow South who were convicted of murdering or raping white victims; many sources say that Stinney was the youngest person executed in the US in the 20th century. However, this may be incorrect. In a little-known 1915 case, a black boy named Joe Persons was executed for the rape of an 8-year-old white girl when he was aged between 12 and 15 in Georgia; the official state execution registry states that Persons was 14, but a mercy petition claimed that he was 13, a newspaper in Philadelphia that Persons' age was 13, a Kentucky newspaper that he was "no older than 14", and a 1986 Los Angeles Times article that various 1915 newspaper accounts listed Persons' age as between 12 and 15, with his weight of 65 pounds indicating he was more likely closer to the former age. Sources from 1915 claim there was absolutely no doubt about Persons' guilt; the state execution registry claims that Persons' crime was so bad that Persons' own father supported his execution and the Kentucky newspaper claimed that Persons had admitted to his crime and was ready to die.