George Stinney Jr. was just 14, a kid fond of art and airplanes with his whole life ahead of him, when men led him from his home and made him confess to crushing two girls’ skulls with a 15-inch piece of iron and leaving their lifeless bodies in a ditch beneath a bicycle.
A month later in 1944, an all-white male jury found the Black boy guilty of murdering the two white girls. The Clarendon County trial lasted a day, deliberations just 10 minutes. No appeals were filed, no stays requested, and 53 days later, Stinney was killed in Columbia on June 16, 1944, the youngest person legally executed in the U.S. that century.
With South Carolina set to resume executions Friday for the first time since 2011, the cruel and unusual case of George Stinney is worth revisiting. He is not the youngest person ever to be executed. The New York Times reports eight people have been executed for crimes committed when they were 12 or younger. But Stinney didn’t do it.
He was so small news reports say prison guards had trouble attaching an electrode built for an adult to his right leg. One report says, “The first 2,400-volt of electricity shooting through Stinney’s body caused the death mask that covered his face — which, again, was made for an adult — to slip off, revealing the teen’s tear-stained face to those witnessing the execution.” It took nearly 4 minutes and three jolts of electricity to kill him.
Decades later, Stinney’s youngest sister said she was grazing the family cow with him that fateful day when they saw the two girls, alive. She said she returned home with him and the cow, and they spent the afternoon together. She said that she hid in the chicken coop when the men took her brother away. After that, the family fled Alcolu, relocating to Pinewood and then to Sumter, fearful of the vengeance of locals.
Amie Ruffner recalled all this in court in 2014, long after her brother was put to death by a legal system that let him down every step of the way. South Carolina Judge Carmen Mullen listened to Stinney’s younger siblings, no longer young, and vacated his conviction.
Mullen’s 28-page ruling almost reads like a novel except that it really happened. It changed the legacy of Stinney’s life, and it cites all the guardrails that have been erected since he was killed that might have kept him alive: confession safeguards, rights to impartial juries and effective counsel, required appeals of executions.
It takes on greater resonance with the state set to resume killing death row inmates who have exhausted appeals. They had been left in limbo until July when the state Supreme Court legalized execution by lethal injection, electrocution and firing squad. Starting Friday, executions could occur every five weeks for six men convicted of heinous crimes whose sentences have already been appealed unsuccessfully to the state Supreme Court.
Their system is different than Stinney’s. The state has required appeals since 1996 in sentences involving capital punishment. And the U.S. determined in 2005 that imposing the death penalty on anyone younger than 18 is cruel and unusual punishment.
In 2013, better lawyers than the one Stinney had in 1944 invoked the unusual legal theory of “coram nobis” to overturn his conviction, citing serious errors and omissions that denied him due process and saying there was no other remedy to right the state’s fatal wrong.
Mullen drew the case and found the original lawyer, Charles H. Plowden, “did little to nothing in defending Stinney.” She called him “the essence” of an “ineffective” lawyer.
She found no written confession in the record and no evidence of a murder weapon or bloody clothes at his trial. She found that Stinney’s lawyer called few to no witnesses to defend him, certainly not his siblings, and conducted little to no cross-examination. She found that case law now says that no death sentence should be imposed “out of whim, passion, prejudice or mistake.” It was the system self-correcting, just way, way too late.
In court, a man who talked to Stinney in jail recalled him saying “that they were going to electrocute him … and that he didn’t kill the girls, and that they made him say those things.” A forensic psychiatrist who wrote her 2010 thesis on the Stinney case added that “any confession given was a coerced, compliant false confession and is unreliable.”
The miscarriage of justice was as clear to Mullen as it was to Stinney’s family years ago.
“Since the time of trial, the Jim Crow era has evolved into the Civil Rights era,” Mullen wrote. “Both have come and gone, resulting in great social, legal and administrative progress in this region. … Regardless of that progress, from time to time we are called to look back to examine our still-recent history and correct injustice where possible.”
There was no appeal of Mullen’s ruling in 2014. It will stand for all time, a stark acknowledgment that an execution is irreversible and the state can get it wrong. Just as those girls deserved justice, Stinney deserved a better story.
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