The execution of George Stinney Jr. took place on June 16, 1944, at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina, roughly eighty-three days after the fourteen-year-old was arrested for the murders of two white girls in Alcolu. He remains the youngest person put to death in the United States during the twentieth century. In 2014, a South Carolina circuit court vacated his conviction, finding the original proceedings so deeply flawed they amounted to a fundamental denial of due process.
Who George Stinney Was
George was a Black fourteen-year-old living in Alcolu, a small South Carolina sawmill town where the railroad tracks physically separated Black and white families. His father worked at the sawmill. Clarendon County was nearly three-quarters Black, but Black residents could not vote, could not serve on juries, and could not attend the trials of their neighbors. Jurors were drawn from voter rolls, so all-white juries were structurally guaranteed rather than coincidental.
The Arrest and the Confession
On March 24, 1944, eleven-year-old Betty June Binnicker and eight-year-old Mary Emma Thames went looking for wildflowers near the tracks. They briefly asked George and his younger sister Amie where they could find maypops. The Stinney children said they did not know and went back to looking for the family’s cow. The girls were found the next morning in a water-filled ditch, beaten to death.
Deputies came for George that afternoon. No warrant was obtained. His parents were not there. Officers took him to a jail in a neighboring county without telling the family where he was going. Within hours, a white mob formed in Alcolu, George’s father lost his job at the sawmill, and the Stinney family had to flee the town, leaving their home behind.
Police interrogated George for hours without a lawyer, a parent, or any other adult on his side. Officers then claimed he had confessed to killing both girls. That oral statement became the entire spine of the prosecution’s case. No transcript was made. No signed statement exists. The only record is a handwritten note from a deputy asserting that George confessed and led officers to the murder weapon, described variously across accounts as a piece of iron, a spike, and a railroad spike. No blood was ever found on his clothing, his body, or anything else tied to him.
The Trial
The trial ran on April 24, 1944, at the Clarendon County Courthouse. Start to finish, it lasted fewer than three hours. The courtroom was segregated, and Black citizens, including George’s parents, were barred from attending. All twelve jurors were white.
Charles Plowden, George’s court-appointed attorney, called no witnesses. He offered no alibi. He did not meaningfully cross-examine the state’s witnesses. He did not challenge the unrecorded confession or the absence of physical evidence. The jury deliberated for ten minutes before returning a guilty verdict for first-degree murder.1South Carolina Judicial Department. State of South Carolina v. George Stinney, Jr. The judge sentenced George to death by electrocution the same day. Plowden filed no appeal.
How the Execution Was Carried Out
South Carolina executed George on June 16, 1944. He stood five feet one inch and weighed about ninety-five pounds. The electric chair had been built for adult men. According to widely repeated accounts, prison staff placed a Bible on the seat as a booster so his head would reach the electrodes. Guards struggled to fasten the leather straps around his arms and legs. The adult-sized face mask did not fit properly.
When the executioner sent 2,400 volts through the chair, the mask slipped off, exposing his face to the witnesses in the room. Newspaper accounts from the time reported that his eyes were open and streaming with tears. Two more jolts followed. George Stinney Jr. was pronounced dead and buried shortly afterward. For decades the case receded from public attention.
How the Conviction Was Vacated in 2014
In the early 2000s, researchers and surviving family members began to reexamine the case. What was striking was not evidence of guilt but the near-total absence of it. No physical evidence tied George to the killings. The alleged weapon was never conclusively identified. The confession was oral, uncorroborated, and taken from a child held in isolation. Nearly all the original transcripts and files had disappeared over the decades.
George’s sister, Amie Ruffner, was still living. At a 2014 hearing she testified under oath that she had been with George the entire time the two girls passed through the area on March 24, 1944. That alibi had never been presented at trial because Plowden called no defense witnesses at all.1South Carolina Judicial Department. State of South Carolina v. George Stinney, Jr.
The Stinney family’s legal team filed a petition for a writ of coram nobis, a rarely used remedy that allows a court to reopen a case when fundamental errors of fact tainted the original proceedings and that carries no statute of limitations.2Death Penalty Information Center. State of South Carolina v. George Stinney, Jr. – Amicus Curiae Brief
Circuit Court Judge Carmen Mullen presided and issued a detailed ruling. She found violations of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ protection against convictions obtained through coerced confessions, the Sixth Amendment right to effective counsel, and the broader guarantee of due process.1South Carolina Judicial Department. State of South Carolina v. George Stinney, Jr. She wrote that the interrogation methods “may have been unduly suggestive, unrestrained, and non-compliant with the standards of criminal procedure,” and that the court-appointed lawyer “did little to nothing” to defend George, calling his representation “the essence of being ineffective.”
The conviction was vacated. That is not the same as a formal declaration of innocence. It means the court found the legal process so broken that the outcome could not be treated as legitimate. The ruling came seventy years after the execution it could not undo.
Why This Case Could Not Happen Today
For decades after George Stinney’s death, American law still permitted the execution of people who committed crimes as minors. That ended in 2005 with Roper v. Simmons, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that executing anyone for a crime committed before age eighteen violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.3Justia. Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005) Judge Mullen’s 2014 order pointed to this rule directly, noting that “the execution of an individual who was a minor at the time of committing a capital crime is prohibited by the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.”1South Carolina Judicial Department. State of South Carolina v. George Stinney, Jr. The legal framework that let a fourteen-year-old be arrested, tried, convicted, and electrocuted in eighty-three days no longer exists.