Update: Conviction of Youngest Executed Tossed Out

Dec. 17, 2914 update:  Conviction thrown out.  

June 2014 update:  70th anniversary of the execution, and NYT with another piece.   Lynching-in-slow-motion.

JANUARY UPDATE:  NYT with major piece on this today. 

Earlier:  But 70 years too late.  Because, you see, we executed him in 1944. At 14 he remains the youngest prisoner put to death in this country in many decades.   George Stinney, Jr. was (you won't be shocked) charged with killing two white girls in S. Carolina.  His execution was well-publicized and brutal (as I cover in my e-book on capital punishment in the USA, Dead Reckoning ).  Stinney weighed just 90 pounds and the Bible he carried had to be used for him to sit on so the electric chair could do its work.  Now lawyers seek a new trial.

Burgess said a member of the search party that found the girls' bodies has offered new testimony that raises questions about where the crime was carried out and whether Stinney was capable of doing it.

Stinney's sister, Amie Ruffner, now in her 70s and living in New Jersey, will testify that Stinney was with her the entire day of the murders and could not have killed the girls, Burgess said.

She was never asked to speak on her brother's behalf at the original trial.

--G.M.