COLUMBIA, S.C. — More than 70 years after South Carolina sent a 14-year-old black boy to the electric chair in the killings of two white girls in a segregated mill town, a judge threw out the conviction, saying the state committed a great injustice.
His name was George Stinney.
His family has been trying to get him a new trial for decades.
There will not be a new trial. But the conviction has been overturn, as the quote from Washington Post story makes clear, there was no doubt in the mind of the judge who issued the ruling about how wrong what happened was.
George Stinney was arrested, convicted of murder in a one-day trial and executed in 1944 — all in the span of about three months and without an appeal. The speed in which the state meted out justice against the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century was shocking and extremely unfair, Circuit Judge Carmen Mullen wrote in her ruling Wednesday.
I can think of no greater injustice,” Mullen wrote.
His trial lasted all of 3 hours, he was found guilty and sentenced to death.
As noted, he was black and fourteen. But let me put this into context:
I am going to share in order some tweets on this from New York Time columnist Charles M. Blow (@CharlesMBlow):
This case may be from 70 years ago, but the pattern continues. I have been reading and writing about a powerful book by Bryan Stevenson, and if you will allow me to again share something I quoted in this diary:
By 2010, Flroida had sentenced more than a hundred children to life imprisonment without parole for non-homicide offenses, several of whom were thirteen years old at the time of the crime. All of youngest condemned children - thirteen or fourteen years of age - were black or Latino. Florida had the largest population in the world of children condemned to die in prison for non-homicides.
As a matter of law, with the conviction vacated, George Stinney is innocent, and yet he was executed.
We cannot have a new trial for a jury to find him not guilty - too much time has passed, too many witnesses are dead.
It is hard to imagine anywhere today where someone would be convicted and sentenced to death in a trial lasting only 3 hours.
But then, look again at the paragraph I have just quoted. That too should be hard to imagine.
I am not Black.
Because I am broken, as I noted in this diary, I am capable of compassion - com = with passio = to suffer. It is vicarious, my suffering, but insofar as I recognize our common humanity it is real, my suffering.
Stinney had a trial. He was not lynched.
We still have perverted trials and sentences and grand jury functions.
Unfortunately we still have lynchings, only now rather than it being a mob with a rope or a cross, too often it is a policemen or a cop-wanna-be with a gun.
America still has the stain of racism all over our society.