Max Ou

14-year old George Stinney Jr (at the front) on his way to electric chair in 1944. George Stinney Jr. was led into the death house at South Carolina's state prison in Columbia. Standing just 5 feet 1 inch tall and weighing about 95 pounds, Stinney was a child being led toward an adult punishment that would take his life. Stinney had been convicted of murdering two young white girls, Betty June Binnicker and Mary Emma Thames, in the segregated town of Alcolu, South Carolina. His trial lasted only one day. An all-white jury deliberated for roughly ten minutes before finding him guilty and sentencing him to death. His court-appointed lawyer presented almost no meaningful defense, did not call family members who could have provided an alibi, and filed no appeal. On June 16, 1944, just weeks after his conviction, South Carolina executed Stinney in the electric chair. He became the youngest person executed in the United States during the 20th century. His small size reportedly created difficulties because the electric chair had been designed for adults. For decades, Stinney's family maintained that he had not committed the murders. In 2014, seventy years after his execution, a South Carolina judge vacated his conviction, finding that his constitutional right to due process had been violated and that his defense had been fundamentally inadequate. The ruling did not conduct a new trial, but it formally overturned the conviction.