70 Years to Justice: The Terrifying Story of George Stinney Jr., the Boy Exonerated After Death

On a spring afternoon in 1944, George Stinney Jr., 14, and his little sister were grazing the family’s cow near railroad tracks that separated Black and white families in Alcolu, South Carolina. Two white girls, ages 11 and 7, stopped by to ask where they could find wildflowers called maypops. When George said he didn’t know, the girls went on their way.  The girls’ bludgeoned bodies were found the next morning. That afternoon, deputy sheriffs came to the Stinney home, handcuffed George, and took him  away. They questioned him for hours, without his parents or a lawyer present, and claimed the Black boy had confessed to killing the white girls. No written or oral confession—no evidence of any kind against young George—was produced. George’s father was fired from his job at the sawmill that night. Amid threats of a white mob, the family was forced to flee town.

A month later, in a courtroom overflowing with 1,500 white spectators, George faced a sham trial virtually alone. Black citizens, including his parents, were barred from attending. George’s attorney, a tax commissioner with political ambitions, neither challenged the prosecution nor called any defense witnesses. The trial lasted two hours. The jury—all 12 jurors were white in a county that was almost three-quarters Black—convicted George after deliberating for 10 minutes. The judge sentenced him to death that day. There were no appeals.

And so, on the morning of June 16, 1944, 14-year-old George Stinney Jr. faced his execution alone. At 90 pounds, he was so small that state officials made him sit on a book—said to be the Bible he carried with him to the death chamber—in order to strap him to the electric chair. Even so, his feet did not reach the floor. As 2,400 volts of electricity surged through his body, according to newspaper accounts, the mask slipped, revealing George’s  eyes—wide open and streaming with tears.

He was the youngest person documented to have been executed in the U.S. in the 20th century.  Seventy years later, in 2014, the case was reopened and evidence of George Stinney’s innocence was presented. Circuit Court Judge Carmen T. Mullen vacated the conviction, finding that George Stinney was fundamentally deprived of due process throughout the proceedings against him and that his alleged confession “simply cannot be said to be known and voluntary.” The court also found that George’s court-appointed attorney “did little to nothing” to defend him, writing that the lawyer’s representation was “the essence of being ineffective.” The judge concluded, “I can think of no greater injustice.”

George Stinney’s case was no outlier in American history. The American Law Institute specified in the 1962 Model Penal Code that “civilized societies will not tolerate the spectacle of execution of children.” But in fact, the U.S. tolerated the execution of children until 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark Roper v. Simmons decision banning the juvenile death penalty as a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.  Court-ordered executions of children were not the only “spectacle” American society tolerated. As EJI has documented, dozens of Black children were lynched in the 20th century. Many of these racial terror lynchings were carried out by mobs of white people in broad daylight. Local, state, and federal officials tolerated—and sometimes encouraged and participated in—these lawless killings, especially by granting impunity to mob participants, who rarely faced criminal prosecutions or any other consequences for their actions.

James Gillespie, believed to be as young as 10, and his brother, Harrison, about 13, were lynched by a mob of white people in Rowan County, North Carolina, in 1902. A 10-year-old girl named Dosia Padgett was lynched along with her father Sam Padgett in Tattnall County, Georgia, in 1907 by 500 armed white men. Willie Howard, 15, was lynched by a mob of white people who forced his father, James Howard, to witness his son’s lynching in Suwannee County, Florida, in January 1944—six months before George Stinney Jr. was executed by the state of South Carolina.

Who Was Executed? Persistent Racial Disparities

Children who were sentenced to death and those who were executed in the U.S. were overwhelmingly poor, Black, male, and residing in Southern states. Legal scholar Victor L. Streib’s landmark 1987 study of American “juvenile executions” found that, in a nation where Black people have never comprised more than 15% of the population, 69% of people executed for crimes committed before they turned 18 were Black.

In 89% of cases ending in executions, the victim was white, according to Mr. Streib’s study, which documented 281 executions of children dating back to colonial times. The majority of child executions were in the South,  91% of 183 people executed for offenses committed before they turned 18 were Black.

Racial disparities in juvenile death penalty cases can also be seen at the state level. Twelve of the 18 children Texas executed between 1859 and 1986 were Black. So were all 17 teenagers executed by Virginia, and all 11 executed by Alabama. Of 41 teenagers Georgia executed between 1848 and 1957 for juvenile crimes, 39 were Black. All 45 juveniles sentenced to death in South Carolina between 1865 and 1972 were Black, according to a 2017 study. Thirty-one—including George Stinney—were executed.

As EJI has reported, two-thirds of the people executed in America in the 1930s were Black. By 1950, African Americans comprised 22% of the South’s population but made up 75% of the people executed there.  The rate of executions slowed by the 1960s as more states abolished the death penalty, and in 1972, the Supreme Court banned the use of the death penalty until new laws were upheld in 1976.  But the racial imbalance in juvenile executions persisted. Of 19 people put to death between 1990 and 2003 for crimes when they were children, 12 were Black or Latino. In 14 of the 19 cases, the victims were white.  In 2005, when the Supreme Court banned the execution of people convicted of crimes as children, the 71 men on death row for crimes committed before age 18 included 47 men of color. The ruling came too late for the 281 people executed in America for crimes that occurred when they were children.