The conviction of a 14-year-old black boy sent to the electric chair after being found guilty of killing two white girls 70 years ago was overturned yesterday.
Making the judgment, Carmen Mullen said the case, one of the American judicial system’s starkest examples of racial prejudice in the deep south, was a great injustice.
George Stinney was arrested, convicted of murder in a one-day trial and executed all in the span of about three months and without an appeal. His trial lasted three hours, and a jury of 12 white men took ten minutes to find him guilty.
He had stood accused of the murders of Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, 8, in the spring of 1944.
They were beaten badly in