It took 70 years to exonerate the youngest person to be executed in the United States over the last century, after it took less than 10 minutes to send him to the chair. Back in June 16 of 1944, George Stinney Jr., an 14-year-old African-American was wrongfully sentenced to death by an all-white jury for the murder. And finally, last Wednesday, a South Carolina judge found him innocent.

​Stinney was sentenced to the electric chair falsely accused of killing two white girls who were picking wildflowers near a drainage ditch, not very close to the boy’s family home.

Courtroom witnesses at the time reported that the boy could hardly walk under the weight of the shackles as he appeared in court, where it took no more than 10 minutes for him to be convicted.

That day over seven decades ago, Stinney walked for the last time. Weighing less than 100 pounds, the young boy was so small that the executioners had to sit him on top of a thick book so that he could reach the electrodes connected to his head.

The case exhibited some irregularities. For one, it focused on the boy’s confession, which, according to a former cellmate who later testified on the boy’s behalf, was obtained under police pressure, a tactic common in the racist regime of the pre-civil rights era South under the “Jim Crow” laws.

In 2013, Stinney’s family managed to reopen the case. Surviving family members stated that Stinney was in the house when the girls were killed.


Source: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/70-Years-Later-14-Year-Old-Black-Youth-Proven-Innocent-20141218-0051.html

Seriously, white man stinks