Seventy years after South Carolina executed a 14-year-old boy so small he sat on a phone book in the electric chair, a circuit court judge threw out his murder conviction.
George Junius Stinney, Jr. (October 21, 1929 – June 16, 1944) was, at age 14, the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century.
Stinney, an African-American youth from South Carolina, was convicted of the first-degree murder of two pre-teen white girls: 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker, and 8-year-old Mary Emma Thames. However, no physical evidence existed in the case, and the sole evidence against Stinney was the circumstantial fact the girls had spoken with Stinney and his sister shortly before their murder and the testimony of three police officers, presented at a trial which lasted barely two hours, that Stinney had confessed to the murders. He was executed by electric chair.
Since Stinney’s conviction and execution, the question of his guilt, the validity of his confession, and the judicial process leading to his execution have been criticized as “suspicious at best and a miscarriage of justice at worst.”
On December 17, 2014, his conviction was posthumously vacated.
