George Stinney Jr.’s Case Files

Files that Could Prove His Innocence

Files that Doesn’t Prove His Guilt or Innocence

Files that Could Prove His Guilt

Safekeeping Document 1 Overview of Case Electrocution Form

Safekeeping Document 2 Response to Inquiry Letter from Warden

Handwritten Notes about the Crime

Family Information (Relatives) Mug Shot Article 2

A Letter from the 60s Inquiring about the Case

Death Certificate

Article 1

OVERVIEW OF CASE

SAFEKEEPING DOCUMENT 1 W/ FINGERPRINTS

ELECTROCUTION FORM

SAFEKEEPING DOCUMENT 2

FAMILY INFORMATION (RELATIVES): Why do you think they didn’t include the mother or sister as relatives?

A LETTER FROM THE 60s INQUIRING ABOUT THE CASE

HANDWRITTEN NOTES ABOUT THE CRIME

RESPONSE TO INQUIRY LETTER FROM THE WARDEN

MUG SHOT

DEATH CERTIFICATE

Article 1:

New trial sought for South Carolina teen executed for 1944 murdersBy Harriet McLeod

CHARLESTON, South Carolina Sun Jan 19, 2014 1:09pm EST

George Stinney Jr. was the youngest person to be executed in the United States in the last century, and attorneys say the request for another trial so long after a defendant's death is the first of its kind in the state.

No official record of the original court proceedings exists; no trial participants are alive, and no evidence was preserved. The law is unclear on whether any statute of limitations would prevent the case from being reopened.

Despite those obstacles, attorneys for Stinney's family will argue at a hearing on Tuesday that the crime that rocked the small mill town of Alcolu in 1944 deserves another look.

"This is a horrific case," defense lawyer Steven McKenzie said. "Whether justice is 70 years old or one year old or one month old, we think justice needs to be done."

The defense filed its motion requesting a new trial in October based on newly discovered evidence. Since then, new witnesses who could help exonerate Stinney have come forward, including a former cell mate who says the teen told him police forced his confession, attorneys said.

The defense also is relying on old newspaper accounts and a few records in state and county archives to make their case to a judge in Sumter, about 20 miles from the town where Stinney was tried and convicted.

Lawyers said they had determined Stinney was convicted solely on testimony by police who said the teen confessed to killing Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, 7. The two girls disappeared on March 23, 1944, after leaving home on their bicycles to look for wildflowers.

The girls rode a distance of about a mile to a railroad track that divided the segregated town, according to the defense's account of the case in court records.

Stinney and his younger sister Amie were sitting on the tracks as their family cow grazed nearby. Stinney's sister recalls the girls asking where they could find flowers before both pairs of children went their separate ways.

Binnicker and Thames never returned home. A search party found their bodies the next morning in a shallow ditch behind a church. Their skulls had been crushed and the bicycles laid on top of them.

After Stinney told someone he had seen the girls along the railroad tracks, he was picked up by police and held for five days before being arrested, said Matthew Burgess, one of the attorneys seeking a new trial.

"Since he became identified as the person who had seen them last before they died, they decided to arrest him," Burgess said.

The teen's family was run out of town, and his siblings never saw him again, Burgess said.

SWIFT COURT PROCEEDINGS

Stinney's lawyers called no witnesses during his daylong trial a month after the murders, according to the current defense team, and a jury of white men deliberated for only 10 minutes before finding him guilty.

Then-governor Olin D. Johnston refused to grant clemency. Stinney, who weighed just 95 pounds, was executed by electrocution in June 1944.

Article 2

Stinney family lawyer: ‘This case will not die’By JOHN MONK

jmonk@thestate.comJanuary 21, 2014 

SUMTER — The state prosecutor fighting a bid to overturn a 70-year-old jury verdict and death sentence given a 14-year-old African-American boy in 1944 ripped into the defense case Tuesday, sending a clear signal the defense has an uphill struggle to get a new trial.

“The evidence here is too speculative, and the record too unclear, for this motion to succeed,” 3rd Circuit Solicitor Chip Finney told Circuit Judge Carmen Mullen in opening remarks to an overflow crowd at the Sumter County courthouse.

It was the first day of one of the most unusual criminal hearings in state history – the judge is hearing a motion to rule that the trial of young George Stinney Jr. in Clarendon County was so unfair, on so many grounds, that the jury verdict should be overturned.

The hearing resumes Wednesday for its second and final day. Mullen may issue a ruling at day’s end.

“This case will not die,” Stinney family lawyer Steve McKenzie told Mullen in his opening remarks, quoting a letter written to the governor in 1944 by a white librarian saying Stinney’s trial and execution will cause future South Carolinians to “look back with remorse and shame.”

Stinney was the youngest person ever executed in the United States. Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court has outlawed executing juveniles. More strict criminal procedures protecting defendants’ rights have been enacted.

McKenzie was one of three Manning lawyers, assisted by Charleston School of Law professor Miller Shealy, who put up four witnesses Tuesday – three Stinney siblings in their 70s and 80s and a forensic pathologist.

The three siblings – two younger sisters and a younger brother – told a story of a law-abiding black family in a segregated but peaceful World War II-era Clarendon County rural community called Alcolu.

Their father, George Stinney Sr., worked in a sawmill; their mother, was a cook in an elementary school, they testified. It was a strict household, with churchgoing and attention to schoolwork. They had a cow and chickens and grew vegetables. They went to a school for black children. The kids did chores; George’s was to graze the cow, whose name was Lizzie.

Then one day, “everything went haywire,” Katherine Stinney Robinson, 79, a retired teacher from New Jersey, testified.

That was the day when two young white girls – Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, 8 – were found bludgeoned to death, their bodies tossed in a trench not far from the Stinney house. They had been out bicycling and looking for maypops – a lemony little fruit.

Police soon came to the three-room Stinney house, searched it and took young George away. With their parents, the siblings fled Clarendon County that night and never saw him alive again. No Stinney family member was called to testify at the 1944 trial.

After his execution, they buried him in an unmarked plot “because we was afraid people would come to desecrate his grave,” one sibling testified.

Under questioning by McKenzie and another defense lawyer, Ray Chandler, the siblings’ testimony, taken as a whole, contained these points: that George Stinney didn’t have the opportunity to kill the girls; that at 95 pounds, he was too small; and police didn’t recover any bloody clothes from the house.

Stinney, a seventh-grader, also was portrayed as harmless.

“All he wanted to do was to be an artist and draw. Every time he saw an airplane fly overhead, he would try to draw it,” AimeStinneyRuffner, 77, testified. “He was quiet, but he was smart.”

Finney cross-examined each sibling, getting them to acknowledge that for decades, they had done nothing to get a lawyer to challenge the case.

Earlier, in questioning Robinson, Finney got her to admit she actually hadn’t seen the two slain girls passing the Stinney house as she had claimed on direct examination by her own lawyer. The point was important because, in the context of the defense case, it would have gone to show Stinney couldn’t have killed the girls.

… Finney put up one witness late Tuesday afternoon, Paul Fann, who in 1944 was a 10-year-old boy who worked for his father delivering ice in the Alcolu community.

Fann’s testimony contained this crucial point: he had been outside the Stinney house while law officers searched it and saw a man come out with “an armful of clothes. He went out and put them in a car.”

“Then they came out with a young man and put him in a car,” Fann said, describing how law officers took Stinney into custody.

Fann’s testimony contradicted earlier testimony by Stinney siblings that implied law officers hadn’t seized any of George’s clothing, which Finney says would have been bloody.

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2014/01/21/3218930/new-trial-sought-in-case-of-george.html#storylink=cpy