George Stinney Jr: African-American boy, 14, youngest to be executed in US, was exonerated 70 years after death
Post-Civil War, after slavery was abolished in 1865, the Southern States installed a discriminatory set of codes as a means of racial justice. The South was where a predominant portion of the African-American population lived, and they were forced to embrace a criminal justice system suffused in racism. The 'Black Codes' or 'Jim Crow' as they were called, allowed for the imprisonment of several black men, women, and children, usually falsely convicted of crimes and forced to return to slavery-like conditions and lasted well into the late 1900s. Even in the latter part of the 20th century, when the Civil Rights movement spurred on, the black protesters were deemed 'law-breakers' and subjected to arrest, incarceration and violence at the hands of the police.
In the Jim Crow South, on a fateful day in March 1944, a band of white men adorned in police uniforms barged into the home of 14-year-old George Stinney Jr in Alcolu, a segregated mill town in South Carolina, cuffed him and took him into custody. Stinney was a young black boy and unfortunately also the last to have seen Betty June Binnicker, 11, Mary Emma Thames, 7, who had been on their way to find some wildflowers, before their bodies were discovered in a waterlogged ditch. They had been bludgeoned to death with a railroad spike, and the police's suspicion ruled that it was Stinney's doing. He was loaded into the police car and taken down to the station.
Alone with white authorities, he confessed to murdering the two girls, or so said the Clarendon Deputy Sheriff HS Newman to the papers, merely 40 minutes after Stinney's arrest. Newman said Stinney had fatally struck the girls with a foot-long railroad spike when they rejected his sexual advances and threatened to tell their parents. After confessing, Stinney led the officers to spot in the woods where he had hidden the murder weapon, Newman added.
Alcolu was a segregated mill town, where the whites and blacks lived on either side of the railroad, but worked integrated at the mill. Like most families in the town, the Stinneys were poor as well, only having enough to barely get them by. After Stinney's arrest, his father was fired from the mill, and rumors of lynchers coming for them forced the family to flee to their relatives' house. All the while, the parents had no clue as to Stinney's whereabouts, neither did they get to speak to him.
His trial was held a little over a month after his arrest and none of his parents were in the court that day, as he faced an all-white jury for the final judgment. After a trial that lasted only two-hour-10-minute deliberation, the verdict was out: Guilty with no recommendation for mercy. Judge PH Stoll of Kingstree sentenced him to the electric chair, and while that sparked protests in and around town for reconsideration for a life imprisonment sentence, the verdict-maker hadn't budged. There was no hope for an appeal for the young boy, who had accepted that he would meet his end for a crime he didn't commit by electrocution. The night before his execution, Stinney reportedly asked his cellmate, Johnny Hunter, "Why Would They Kill Me for Something I Didn’t Do?"
On June 16, 1994, Stinney embraced Hunter one final time and muttered a soft "Bye", when he heard the sound of keys clanging and a pair of white officers appear in front of his cell. It was time, he had known. Later that day, and just 84 days after the two little girls had been found dead, 14-year-old George Stinney became the youngest person in America to be executed by the law. At barely five feet tall and less than 100 pounds in weight, he looked so tiny as he sat on the electric chair and the straps were too big to confine his little body. Newspapers at the time wrote Stinney had to sit on books in order for him to reach the headpiece. An unjust trial and brutal execution later, Stinney was never to be seen or heard from again.
In December 2014, 70 years after his execution, Stinney was posthumously exonerated of his charges. His case was thoroughly reevaluated at his family's request and the judge ruled that he had been denied due process. His first-degree murder conviction was scrapped and his siblings claimed that his confession had been coerced because he had an alibi. At the time of the murders that he had been charged with, Stinney had been with younger sister Aime, as he guided the family's cow for grazing. Even his former cellmate, Hunter, claimed that Stinney had denied murdering Binnicker and Thames. In her verdict, Circuit Judge Carmen Mullen wrote that she found that "fundamental, Constitutional violations of the due process exist in the 1944 prosecution of George Stinney, Jr, and hereby vacates the judgment," per NPR.
Stinney's initial trial, the lack of evidence, and the way in which his case was handled perfectly described the racial tensions of the time. His speedy conviction only went to show how a young African-American boy was condemned by a discriminatory and racist all-white justice system. On the day of his two-hour trial that ended with his death sentence, the defense had called on few or no witnesses, and the case was devoid of any written record of a confession. The false accusations against Stinney and the injustice meted out to him throughout the trial and thereafter rings true even in the present day scenario where despite efforts to abolish the Black Codes, it is still unofficially in practice.
Racial bias and inequality in American society may not be bound by law, but it is still rampant. If the recent happenings are anything to go buy, it is the same injustice against African-Americans that has fuelled a nation-wide protest. The fight against police brutality, demand for equal rights and a platform for the black community to be heard has galvanized the 'Black Lives Matter' movement. The black community faces injustice even now, which strongly resonates with similar incidents of the past that continue to limit their opportunities and leave them vulnerable.