Day in court for teen executed in 1944
Print Edition
A 14-year-old boy executed by South Carolina nearly 70 years ago is finally getting another day in court.
Supporters of George Stinney plan to argue that there wasn’t enough evidence to find him guilty in 1944 of killing two girls aged 7 and 11.
The black teenager was found guilty of killing the white girls in a trial that lasted less than a day in the southern mill town of Alcolu, separated, as most were in those days, by race.
Nearly all the evidence, including a confession central to the case against Stinney, has disappeared, along with the transcript of the trial. Lawyers working on behalf of Stinney’s family have sworn statements from his relatives accounting for his time the day the girls were killed, from a cellmate saying he never confessed to the crime and from a pathologist disputing the findings of the autopsy done on the victims.
The novel decision whether to give an executed man a new trial will be in the hands of Circuit Judge Carmen Mullen.
Experts say it is a longshot. South Carolina law has a high bar for new trials based on evidence that could have been discovered at the time of the trial. Also, the legal system in the state before segregation often found defendants guilty with evidence that would be considered scant today. If Mullen finds in favor of Stinney, it could open the door for hundreds of other appeals.
But the Stinney case is unique in one way. At 14, he’s the youngest person executed in the United States in the past 100 years. Even in 1944, there was an outcry over putting someone so young in the electric chair. Newspaper accounts said the straps in the chair didn’t fit around his body and an electrode was too big for his leg.
Supporters said racism, common in the South at the time, meant little investigation after Stinney was deemed the suspect. They said he was pulled from his parents and interrogated without a lawyer.
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