George Stinney Jr. was a fourteen-year-old African-American boy who was hanged in South Carolina in 1944 for the murders of two young white girls. Later, he was acquitted in 2014; 70 years after his hanging. George Stinney Jr. is the youngest American and also the youngest person to be executed by electric chair in modern times.
Contents
Wiki/Biography
George Stinney Jr. was born as George Junius Stinney Jr. on Monday, October 21, 1929 (age 14 at the time of death) in Pinewood, South Carolina, United States. He grew up in Alcolu, a small, working-class mill town in South Carolina, where black people and white people were separated by railroad tracks. Although black and white families lived separately on opposite sides of the railroad, people of both races worked together for the D.W. Alderman & Sons Company. George lived with his parents and four siblings in a three-room company house near the railroad tracks in Alcolu, which was reserved for black families. George Stinney Jr. was a 7th grade student at Alcolu’s school for black children.
A rare photograph of George Stinney Jr.
Physical Appearance
Height: 5′ 1″
Eye colour: black
Hair Color: Black
Family and ethnicity
George Stinney Jr. was from an African American family from South Carolina.
parents and siblings
His father, George Stinney Sr., was a former sharecropper who worked in the town’s saw mill, and his mother, Aimee, was a cook at Alcolu’s school for black children. George Stinney Jr. had two brothers – John (17 years old; half-brother) and Charles (12 years old). He had two younger sisters – Catherine (10 years old) and Aimee (7 years old).
Aimee Ruffner with a portrait of her brother, George Stinney Jr.
Katherine Robinson, sister of George Stinney Jr., testifies about what she remembers from the day of his arrest
murder of two white girls
On March 24 or 25, 1944, the bodies of two young white girls, Betty June Binnicker (11 years old) and Mary Emma Thames (7 years old) were found in Alcolu, South Carolina. Both the girls had gone missing a day earlier.
betty june binniker
Mary Emma Thames
The girls were looking for flowers while cycling in Alcolu. When the girls passed by George Stinney Jr.’s house, they saw George and his sister Amy, the girls stopped and asked them if they could tell them where to find mayops, the yellow edible fruit of the passionflower. Reportedly, that was the last time the girls were seen alive.
Historian George Frierson at the track where Stinney spoke to the victims
Betty June Binniker and Mary Emma Thames never reached home that day. The disappearance of Binniker and Thames caused hundreds of Alcolu residents, including George Stinney’s father, to come together and search for the missing girls. The next morning, a search party led by George Burke Sr., one of the lumber mill’s largest owners, discovered the bodies of young girls in a wet ditch in the African American part of Alcolu.
The bodies of 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker and 7-year-old Mary Emma Thames were found in a water-filled ditch in these woods.
According to Dr. Asbury Cecil Bozard, who examined the bodies of Binniker and Thames, the girls died a gruesome death from multiple injuries to the head, but there were no obvious signs of a struggle. The girls were beaten so brutally that a hole was left in Thames’ skull right through his forehead. Thames also had a two-inch long cut above his right eyebrow. Meanwhile, Binnikar was hit on the head at least seven times. Later, it was reported that the back of Binniker’s skull was “nothing but a pile of crushed bones.” Bozard concluded that the girls were probably attacked with a “round instrument shaped like a hammer head”. Later a rumor also started spreading in the town that the girls had stayed at the house of a white family on the day of the murder; However, this was never confirmed and police never searched for a white killer. When a witness informed Clarendon County law enforcement officials that the girls had been seen talking to Stinney, they raided the home of George Stinney Jr. and arrested George Stinney and his older brother Johnny. Later, Johnny is released but George is captured.
The trial of George Stinney Jr.
After George Stinney Jr. was immediately handcuffed, a trial took place that lasted barely two hours, during which he was interrogated in a small room with no attorney, no witnesses, and not even his parents. Even the father was not there. According to police, Stinney confessed to killing Binniker and Thames while trying to have sex with a girl. Arresting officer HS Newman wrote in a handwritten statement,
I arrested a guy named George Stinney. Then he made a statement and told me where to find a piece of iron about 15 inches long. He said he placed it in a ditch about six feet from the bicycle.
The coroner’s report states that 11-year-old Betty June Binniker and 7-year-old Mary Emma Thames died at the hands of 14-year-old George Stinney Jr. and must be apprehended.
Soon after Stinney’s arrest, rumors of a lynching began to spread throughout the city and the police kept Stinney’s whereabouts a secret, with even Stinney’s parents unaware of his whereabouts. About a month after the deaths of Binniker and Thames, the trial of George Stinney Jr. began in the Clarendon County Courthouse. Although Charles Plowden was appointed attorney by the court, he did “little or nothing” to defend George Stinney Jr. During the two-hour hearing, no concrete evidence could be presented for George’s defense, and the most concrete evidence presented against him was his. Alleged confession, although there was no written record of his confession. During the trial, Stinney was surrounded by approximately 1,500 strangers, and had not seen his parents for several weeks. After barely 10 minutes of deliberations, George Stinney Jr. was found guilty by an all-white jury, which did not recommend mercy for him. On April 24, 1944, Kingstree Judge PH Stoll sentenced George Stinney Jr. to die by electrocution.
George Stinney Jr.’s fingerprints from 1944
Protest
As George Stinney’s execution date approached, protests intensified across South Carolina. Protesters petitioned Governor Olin Johnston to grant clemency to George on the grounds of his young age. The Governor’s office received hundreds of letters and telegrams from throughout the state and country; Demand for mercy for George
A letter of clemency to Governor Olin D. Johnson regarding the death sentence of George Stinney Jr. in 1944
Protesters also warned Governor Olin Johnston of racial tensions; However, Johnson did not budge and responded with a letter describing the brutality of George’s alleged crime, Johnson wrote –
I have just spoken to the officer who made the arrest in this case. It may be interesting for you to know that Stinney murdered the younger girl in order to rape the older girl. He then murdered the elder girl and raped her dead body. Twenty minutes later he returned and attempted to rape her again but her body was too cold. He himself accepted all this.
America’s youngest person executed
On June 16, 1944, the day of George Stinney Jr.’s execution, when he walked into the execution chamber at the South Carolina State Penitentiary in Columbia, he was wearing a loose-fitting striped jumpsuit and had a Bible under his arm. , 14 year old George Stinney Jr. was 5′ 1″ tall and weighed just 95 pounds at the time.
George Stinney Jr. entering the execution chamber at the South Carolina State Penitentiary in Columbia
George was strapped into an adult-sized electric chair, and due to his small stature the state electrician struggled to adjust an electrode to George’s right leg. Reportedly, the mask used was too big to cover his face.
The electric chair was used to electrocute George Stinney Jr.
Before his execution, when Stinney was asked if he had any last words, he replied,
no sir.”
When the jail doctor asked,
You don’t want to say anything about what you did?”
George then replied,
no sir.”
Reportedly, when the officers flipped the switch, 2,400 volts of current flowed through Stinney’s body, causing the mask covering George’s face to slip. According to witnesses present in the room, Geroz’s eyes were wide and tearful and saliva was flowing from his mouth. After two more electric shocks, George Stinney Jr. was pronounced dead.
restoration
In 2014, George Stinney Jr.’s murder conviction was overturned, and he was acquitted, 70 years after his execution. On December 17, 2014, in overturning George’s murder conviction, Judge Carmen T. Mullen commuted the death penalty –
A great and fundamental injustice.”
Overjoyed at George’s acquittal, his sister, Katherine Robinson, said,
It was as if the cloud had just gone away. When we got the news, we were sitting with friends… I raised my hands and said, ‘Thank you, Jesus!’ Someone had to listen. This is what we have wanted for so many years.”
in popular media
David Stout’s first novel, “Carolina Skeleton (1988)” was based on the case of George Stinney Jr. In 1991, the novel was adapted as a television film of the same name. In 1993, the famous American writer Albert French wrote a novel “Billy” based on this case. In 1996, Stephen King’s novel “The Green Mile” was also loosely inspired by the Stinney case, the novel was adapted into a Hollywood film of the same name in 1999; Starring Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan, who played “John Coffey”, a character inspired by Stinney’s story.
In 2015, Francis Pollock wrote an opera, Stinny. In 2018, a short film titled “83 Days” was released.
83 days (2018)
Facts/General Knowledge
- George spent his short life in Alcolu, a sawmilling village on the northern ridge of the Pocotaglio Swamp in rural Clarendon County, about 80 miles north of Charleston.
- Geroge’s family grew vegetables in the garden and owned a cow. George Stinney Jr. used to take cows to the meadows for grazing.
- On Sundays, he would go to the nearby Greenhill Baptist Church with the rest of the black families in Alcolu.
- According to George’s cellmate, Wilford “Johnny” Hunter, who was seventeen at the time and had been arrested for having fun in a stolen car, Geroge loved singing country songs from The Grand Ole Opry, and Her favorite was Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor”. On you.”
- George also liked to play hide and seek in the bunk bed.
- His father, George Sr., was fired from his mill job that night when police arrested him at his home.
- After George’s arrest, his family fled to his grandmother’s house in Pinewood.
- According to a reporter for The State newspaper in Colombia, George appeared calm throughout the trial and was “obviously a little worried.”
- During his trial at the Clarendon County Courthouse in downtown Manning, George wore jeans and a pale blue shirt.
- According to George’s cellmate, Wilford “Johnny” Hunter, one time, George told him,
Johnny, after they electrocuted me, I’m coming back and I’m going to haunt you!
Wilford “Johnny” Hunter
- At George’s request, Johnny Hunter also wrote a letter to a preacher in Florida named S.P. Revell, who, according to George, had helped his brother when he was in trouble.
- Once, George asked Johnny Hunter,
Johnny, why do they want to kill me for something I didn’t do? Why?
- In a span of just 83 days, fourteen-year-old George was accused of murder, tried, convicted, and executed by the state.
Categories: Biography
Source: vcmp.edu.vn