Execution of 14-Year-Old Was Unjust, Judge Declares in 'Carolina Skeletons' Case
Execution of 14-Year-Old Was Unjust, Judge Declares
The 1944 trial of a 14-year-old black boy for killing two young girls and the rush to the electric chair that followed constituted a great injustice, a South Carolina state judge ruled on Dec. 17, 2014.
“From time to time we are called to look back to examine our still-recent history and correct injustice where possible,” Circuit Judge Carmen Tevis Mullen wrote. “I can think of no greater injustice than a violation of one’s constitutional rights, which has been proven to me in this case…”
The judge ruled after reviewing the case of George Stinney, who was found guilty of murdering the white girls, aged 7 and 11, as they were picking flowers near a rural sawmill in Clarendon County, South Carolina, on an early spring day. The victims were killed by blows to the head, possibly with a railroad spike, and their bodies were found in a ditch. The case was the basis for Carolina Skeletons, the Edgar Award-winning novel by David Stout.
Stinney was quickly taken into custody, and before long confessed to the Clarendon County sheriff. But Stinney’s relatives insisted that he was intimidated into confessing, as so many other black defendants were in the Jim Crow era. And there was no such thing back thing as a “Miranda warning.”
The judge noted that she was not overturning the case on its merits – in other words, not concluding whether Stinney did or did not commit the crime – but rather because the handling of the case prevented anything resembling a fair trial. The judge presided over a two-day hearing in January 2014, during which supporters of Stinney asked that the conviction be overturned.
The overturning of the conviction is, needless to say, merely symbolic. And to many who have become familiar with the case, the fate of George Stinney was symbolic of racial prejudice and injustice in the South. The trial was held before an all-white jury in Clarendon County, and the defense lawyer apparently did not ask for a change of venue. Nor, apparently, did he consider trying to introduce psychiatric testimony. The defense lawyer was so unenthusiastic that he did not bother to appeal.
The case stirred considerable attention within South Carolina, with some white people urging mercy for Stinney and others eager to see him die. But there was relatively little national attention in those days long before television and the Internet. The New York Times ran one paragraph on it. There was, after all, a much bigger story: the war raging in Europe and the Pacific.
So George Stinney was driven to Columbia for his date with South Carolina’s electric chair, the ride interrupted as the sheriff stopped to buy the condemned boy a candy bar and a Bible. On June 16, 1944, Stinney was put to death after the guards fumbled to secure his small frame to the chair. The straps, after all, were meant to fit grown men.
To look back at the case is to be amazed that less than three months elapsed between the murders and the execution of George Stinney, the youngest defendant to be legally put to death in modern times. Judge Mullen took almost four times as long to hold a hearing and come to her conclusion that something terrible happened in 1944 – something that can’t be undone, only lamented.
