George Stinney

George Stinney was an American- African 14 years old. He was wrongly accused for killing 2 white girls. He was executed as a 14-year-old after being convicted of murdering a pair of white girls. Seven decades after the execution, the conviction was overturned on the grounds that his Sixth Amendment rights had been violated due to his lack of legal defense during the trial. In March of 1944, he was convicted of murdering June Binnicker and Mary Emma Thames in the first-degree following an only two-hour-long trial by an all-white jury. On the day of the murders, he had simply spoken to the two young victims who, in the hours leading up to their deaths, happened to ride their bicycles past his home.

In 1944, George Junius Stinney, Jr. lived in Alcolu, Clarendon County, South Carolina. The 14-year-old African-American boy lived with his father, George Stinney Sr., mother Aime, brothers John, age 17, and Charles, age 12, and sisters Katherine, age 10, and Aime, age 7. George Sr. worked at the town's sawmill, and the family lived in company housing. Alcolu was a small, working-class mill town, where white and black neighborhoods were separated by railroad tracks. The town was typical of small Southern towns of the time, with segregated schools and churches for white and black residents, who rarely interacted. His unjust arrest and conviction caused his father to lose his job and his family members, fearing lynching, to leave their hometown of Alcolu, South Carolina.

After 70 years his innocence has finally proven. 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. He was the youngest person to be executed in the 20th century in the United States. He is innocent after all.