The youngest person ever sentenced to Death was 14 years old George Stinney an african american who was accused of killing white girls aged 11 & 7. He was sentenced and killed with a 5380 volt shock in the electric chair. 70yrs later in 2014, He was proven innocent.
George was accused of killing two white missing girls, 11-Year-old Betty and 7-year-old Mary, their bodies were found near the house where he lived with his parents in Alcolu, South Carolina march 1944.
The sheriff arrested George and his brother John (later released), because he claimed that George confessed and led officers to the ‘place where he hid the murder weapon’. His father was fired from his job at a local sawmill and ordered to vacate the company house.
There was no written statement of his confession apart from the officers words. He was confined for 81 days without any visits.The entire proceeding against Stinney, including the all-white- jury selection, took only one day and no black people were allowed in the courtroom.
It took a jury of 12 white men 10 minutes of deliberation to find George Stinney guilty. His siblings claimed that he had an alibi. At the time of the murders, he was with his sister Aime watching the family’s cow.
George was sentenced and killed with a 5380 volt shock in the electric chair.
He was executed on June 16, 1944, at 7:30 p.m. He was electrocuted with 5,380 volts in his head, imagine all that voltage in a teenager’s head.
It was also noted that a man named Wilford “Johnny” Hunter, who claimed to be Stinney’s cellmate, said that Stinney denied murdering Binnicker and Thames. “He said, ‘Johnny, I didn’t, didn’t do it,’” Hunter said. “He said, ‘Why would they kill me for something I didn’t do?’”
70 years later, his innocence was finally proven by a judge in South Carolina. The boy was innocent, someone set it up to blame him for being black.
May his innocent soul rest in power.
