tim brokopp

Today is the anniversary of the electric-chair execution of George Junius Stinney, Jr. He was 14 years old, and weighed 95 pounds, when he was executed in the state of South Carolina by electric chair. (and he was declared innocent 70 years after his execution). Here's a little more about that horrific event on June 16, 1944. ------------------------- [from my book EXECUTING GRACE] George Junius Stinney Jr. Have you ever heard that name? George Junius Stinney Jr. was the youngest person ever executed in the United States; he was fourteen. He walked to his execution by electric chair carrying a large copy of the Bible under his arm. He was accused of killing two white girls in the Jim Crow South. His trial lasted less than two hours. No witnesses were called, no defense presented. There is no record of a confession or of any physical evidence. And the all-white jury deliberated for a mere ten minutes before sentencing him to death. In one of the quickest executions in history, George Junius Stinney Jr. was killed eighty-one days after being arrested. One of his last meals was ice cream with the officers who would later kill him. His skinny five-foot-one, ninety-five-pound body was so small that his head didn’t reach into the metal helmet of the electric chair, and so he had to sit on the Bible to make it work. He sat on the Bible. When the first jolts of electricity hit him, he flinched and the head mask fell off, revealing the terror in his eyes and the tears streaming down his cheeks. Only after several more jolts of electricity did he finally die. I was so disturbed by George’s story, when I first encountered it, that I couldn’t stop reading about him. I thought maybe his execution had happened in the 1800s, but it was in 1944. Some of his family is still alive. Part of me wishes his execution had occurred hundreds of years ago so that I could write it off to those less civil days and dismiss it by thinking we’ve come a long way since then. But no: it was 1944. The case of George Junius Stinney Jr. is one of the greatest travesties of justice in American history. But his story raises many important questions. And while it is extreme, it is not exceptional. There are many George Stinneys. Some things have changed since 1944. But what’s also striking, as we will see, is how little has changed since 1944. *** In 2014, a South Carolina judge posthumously exonerated George Stinney. Seventy years after his execution, Judge Carmen Mullins threw out his murder conviction. ----------