The Story of Stinney

The Story of Stinney | Aby

1. Alcolu, 1944
53 sec.
A segregated South Carolina mill town of approximately 900 people in Clarendon County. Every adult in Alcolu worked dire…
A segregated South Carolina mill town of approximately 900 people in Clarendon County. Every adult in Alcolu worked directly or indirectly for the Alderman Lumber Company. A single set of railway tracks ran through the middle of the town. Black families lived on one side. White families lived on the other. The schools were segregated. The churches were segregated. The drinking fountains at the mill were segregated. It was, in every measurable way, a completely ordinary Southern town for its year — which is to say, a town in which the boundaries of race and power were understood by everyone from earliest childhood. On the afternoon of March 23, 1944, a 14-year-old Black boy named George Junius Stinney Jr. was in the yard behind his family's small company house. By the following morning, he would be in a locked room in a jailhouse. Within 83 days, he would be dead.
1. Alcolu, 1944
2. George Junius Stinney Jr.
58 sec.
Born October 21, 1929 in Pinewood, South Carolina. Second child of George Junius Stinney Sr. — a millworker at the Alder…
Born October 21, 1929 in Pinewood, South Carolina. Second child of George Junius Stinney Sr. — a millworker at the Alderman Lumber Company — and Aime Stinney. One of six siblings. He attended the segregated Black school on the western side of the Alcolu railway tracks. By family and community accounts, he was quiet, thoughtful, and religiously observant. He drew regularly. He spoke about becoming a preacher. He was, at the time of his death, 14 years old, 5 feet 1 inch tall, and approximately 95 pounds. He remains, more than eighty years later, the youngest person executed by any American state in the twentieth century. That statistic has never been surpassed. Since December 2014, it has also been officially recorded as an execution carried out on the basis of a conviction the state itself has vacated
2. George Junius Stinney Jr.
3. Betty June and Mary Emma
58 sec.
Two children rode a bicycle together on an ordinary March afternoon in a small mill town. Betty June Binnicker was 11. M…
Two children rode a bicycle together on an ordinary March afternoon in a small mill town. Betty June Binnicker was 11. Mary Emma Thames was 7. Both lived on the white side of the Alcolu railway tracks. On the afternoon of March 23, 1944, Betty June rode her bicycle to look for maypops — a wildflower that grows in the fields around Clarendon County. Mary Emma rode with her, seated on the handlebars. They rode past the boundary between the two sides of the town. At some point during the afternoon they stopped and asked two Black children playing in a yard whether they had seen wildflowers nearby. The two Black children were George Stinney Jr., 14, and his younger sister Amie, 8. That brief interaction — asked and answered in a matter of seconds — would become the entire basis of the case against George. Betty June and Mary Emma did not come home that evening. Their bodies were found in a drainage ditch the following morning. Whoever killed them has never been identified in any court — because a court, seventy years ago, decided the case had already been solved.
3. Betty June and Mary Emma
4. The Search Party
1 min. 5 sec.
Evening, March 23, 1944. When the two girls did not return home by dusk, a community search party was organised in Alcol…
Evening, March 23, 1944. When the two girls did not return home by dusk, a community search party was organised in Alcolu. It was led and organised by George Burke Sr., a white sawmill supervisor for the Alderman Lumber Company. Nearly every able-bodied man in the town joined the effort. Both Black and white residents participated. George Stinney Sr. — the accused boy's father, himself an Alderman millworker — was among the searchers. The party worked through the night with lanterns. By early morning of March 24, the bodies of both girls had been located in a water-filled drainage ditch on the outskirts of the town. Their bicycle was found nearby. The bodies showed severe blunt-force head injuries. A railroad spike or similar iron implement was, at the time, suggested by the coroner as the possible weapon. The community was in shock by dawn. Within hours, the demand for an answer had a name attached to it. The name was a 14-year-old boy on the other side of the tracks.
4. The Search Party
5. The Casual Remark
55 sec.
Sometime on the morning after the discovery, George Stinney Jr. reportedly mentioned to a bystander that he had seen bot…
Sometime on the morning after the discovery, George Stinney Jr. reportedly mentioned to a bystander that he had seen both girls the previous day. He said they had ridden a bicycle past his family's yard. He said they had asked him and his younger sister Amie whether they knew where wildflowers grew. He said the two girls had ridden on afterward. It was, by every subsequent account, offered as an ordinary neighbourly recollection. But in Alcolu, in 1944, a 14-year-old Black boy admitting to having spoken with two white girls found dead the same day was not treated as a recollection. It was treated as a lead. Within hours, sheriff's deputies arrived at the Stinney family home. George was taken into custody. His older brother John was arrested at the same time. John would be released within days without any charge. George would not. The evidence connecting him to the deaths of Betty June Binnicker and Mary Emma Thames would never, at any point in the following 83 days, amount to more than that one recollected conversation. And a confession that no one ever wrote down.
5. The Casual Remark
6. The Interrogation
58 sec.
March 24, 1944. A small locked room in the Alcolu jailhouse. A 14-year-old boy. White deputies in uniforms. No parents.…
March 24, 1944. A small locked room in the Alcolu jailhouse. A 14-year-old boy. White deputies in uniforms. No parents. No lawyer. No interpreter for what the room actually was. The interrogation was conducted by white deputies of the Clarendon County Sheriff's Department. The methods used have never been publicly documented. The 2014 forensic psychiatric assessment by Dr Amanda Salas would later find that the power differential in the room — a 14-year-old Black child, alone, questioned by uniformed white law enforcement in a segregated Southern town — was inherently coercive. What is documented is what emerged from the room: an alleged verbal confession. The confession was never written down. It was never signed. It was never recorded. It exists in the historical record only as the deputies' subsequent verbal testimony that it had occurred. On that verbal account alone — without a transcript, without a signature, without an audio recording, without corroborating evidence — the state of South Carolina prepared to prosecute a 14-year-old child for capital murder. He would be dead within three months.
6. The Interrogation
7. The Family Exiled
56 sec.
Within days of the arrest, George Stinney Sr. was dismissed from his position at the Alderman Lumber Company. The family…
Within days of the arrest, George Stinney Sr. was dismissed from his position at the Alderman Lumber Company. The family was informed — informally, but unambiguously — that they were no longer safe in the town. Community accounts subsequently established that a lynch mob had been discussed openly in the days following the arrest. The family relocated at short notice. They left behind furniture, clothing, most of their possessions. They moved to nearby Pinewood — the town where George Jr. had been born. The father would remain unemployed for some months. The younger children, including Amie, were withdrawn from school. The mother, Aime Sr., was reportedly not permitted to visit George at the Clarendon County Jail. The family would never return to Alcolu. Their exile was, in effect, part of the sentence — served before any trial had taken place. By the time George Stinney Jr. was arraigned in the Clarendon County courthouse, his family had been driven out of the community, his father had lost his livelihood, and no member of his household had been permitted to see him for the better part of a month. He was, when he walked into the courtroom, entirely alone.
7. The Family Exiled
8. The Courthouse in Manning
53 sec.
April 24, 1944. Clarendon County Courthouse. Manning, South Carolina. Court of General Sessions, Third Judicial Circuit.…
April 24, 1944. Clarendon County Courthouse. Manning, South Carolina. Court of General Sessions, Third Judicial Circuit. Presiding judge: Philip H. Stoll. Prosecuting solicitor: Frank A. McLeod. Court-appointed defense counsel: Charles N. Plowden — a local tax commissioner reportedly running for local political office at the time. The trial opened at 10:00 a.m. Approximately 1,500 spectators, almost all white, filled the courthouse and its grounds. The defendant's family were not permitted into the courtroom. Jury selection was completed in a matter of minutes. Twelve white men were empanelled. No Black jurors were considered. No motion for change of venue was made. Defense counsel made no opening statement of substance. The prosecution called deputies who described the verbal confession, and coroners who described the injuries. Defense counsel offered little or no cross-examination. He called no witnesses on the defendant's behalf. The 14-year-old boy at the defense table did not testify. The trial, from start to finish, lasted approximately three hours.
8. The Courthouse in Manning
9. The Ten Minutes
1 min. 2 sec.
After three hours of proceedings, the jury retired. It returned after approximately ten minutes. The verdict was guilty…
After three hours of proceedings, the jury retired. It returned after approximately ten minutes. The verdict was guilty of first-degree murder on both counts — the deaths of Betty June Binnicker and Mary Emma Thames. Under South Carolina law of 1944, first-degree murder carried a mandatory death sentence unless the jury recommended mercy. The jury made no recommendation of mercy. Judge Stoll immediately imposed the sentence — death by electrocution. Court-appointed counsel Plowden filed no motion for a new trial. He filed no motion for stay of execution. He filed no appeal of any kind. The entire process — arrest to arraignment to trial to verdict to sentence to execution — would take 83 days. It remains one of the fastest capital cases in modern American legal history. It would take, by contrast, more than 25,000 days for a court in the same state to acknowledge that the process itself had violated the United States Constitution.
9. The Ten Minutes
10. The Empty Record
57 sec.
State of South Carolina v. George Stinney Jr., Case No. 260, Third Judicial Circuit. The case file — as it survives in t…
State of South Carolina v. George Stinney Jr., Case No. 260, Third Judicial Circuit. The case file — as it survives in the South Carolina Department of Archives and History — is essentially empty. No trial transcript exists. No written confession exists. No photographs of the crime scene, the alleged murder weapon, or any physical evidence exist in the state's archived record. No investigative case notes from the Clarendon County Sheriff's Department exist. The court's own docket entries for the trial run to a few lines. Contemporaneous newspaper reporting from The Manning Times and The State survives. The family's testimony survives — passed down through Amie, Charles, and Katherine. But the state's own paper record of the case that ended a child's life is, effectively, a blank shelf. When Judge Mullen would eventually rule, in 2014, that the 1944 case had violated the Constitution, she would note that she could not know whether George Stinney Jr. had committed the crime — because the record needed to answer that question no longer existed and had, at the trial itself, never been properly built.
10. The Empty Record
11. The 83 Days
1 min. 3 sec.
Late April to June 1944. South Carolina State Penitentiary, Columbia. George Stinney Jr. was transferred from the Claren…
Late April to June 1944. South Carolina State Penitentiary, Columbia. George Stinney Jr. was transferred from the Clarendon County Jail in Manning to the state penitentiary in Columbia. He was held in death-row confinement for the 51 days between his transfer and his execution date. His parents were not permitted regular visitation. The record indicates his family were able to see him briefly on only one occasion during that period. He was, by staff accounts, quiet, cooperative, and religiously observant throughout his confinement. He was reported to have drawn extensively — including several pictures given to prison staff. He read his Bible. He reportedly spoke about becoming a preacher. He was 14 years old. The execution date was set for June 16, 1944. No clemency was granted. No stay was issued. No appeal was ever filed on his behalf. In the 83 days between his arrest on March 24 and his execution on June 16, no one with the legal power to intervene did. On the morning of June 16, 1944, the state's deadline arrived.
11. The 83 Days
12. The Morning of June 16, 1944
57 sec.
7:30 a.m. Central Correctional Institution, Columbia, South Carolina. The execution of George Junius Stinney Jr. was sch…
7:30 a.m. Central Correctional Institution, Columbia, South Carolina. The execution of George Junius Stinney Jr. was scheduled for that time. He was escorted from his cell by guards. He is reported to have carried a Bible with him into the chamber. The standard restraints of the electric chair — designed for adult prisoners — did not fit his 5-foot-1-inch, 95-pound frame. According to witness accounts and subsequent reporting, prison staff seated him on the Bible he had carried so that the electrodes would make proper contact. The leather face mask placed over his head slipped off during the initial surge of electric current. Witnesses in the chamber later described what they saw. Their accounts have been widely reported. Death was pronounced at approximately 7:34 a.m. Total elapsed time between his arrest on March 24 and his death — 83 days. He was the youngest person executed by any American state in the entire twentieth century. His body was released to his family for burial. His father took him to a small cemetery near Pinewood. There was no marker on the grave for many years. There was no obituary in the local white press.
12. The Morning of June 16, 1944
13. The Rumor
57 sec.
For decades, a name circulated quietly in Alcolu — the name of a white man from a locally prominent family, alleged by c…
For decades, a name circulated quietly in Alcolu — the name of a white man from a locally prominent family, alleged by community accounts to have been the actual killer of Betty June Binnicker and Mary Emma Thames. The name most commonly reported was that of George Burke Jr., a white man from a prominent local family. His father, George Burke Sr., had led the search party that discovered the bodies on the morning of March 24, 1944. The elder Burke had subsequently served on both the coroner's inquest jury and the grand jury that returned the indictment against George Stinney Jr. The younger Burke reportedly died in 1947 of complications from chronic kidney disease. Community accounts subsequently reported a possible deathbed confession. The Burke family has publicly denied these accounts. The younger Burke was never questioned by law enforcement, never charged, and never tried in connection with the deaths. The 2014 court did not adjudicate this question and made no finding on it. The case, in strict legal terms, remains unsolved. A wrongful execution is never only a wrong done to the executed. It is also, unavoidably, a wrong done to the victims whose actual killer walked free while another child took their place.
13. The Rumor
14. Sixty Years of Silence
54 sec.
In the sixty years following the execution, the case was not litigated further. It appeared in occasional academic writi…
In the sixty years following the execution, the case was not litigated further. It appeared in occasional academic writing on capital punishment and juvenile executions. It appeared in some works on Southern legal history. It was not, in the broader American public consciousness, widely known. In 2004, National Public Radio's Sound Portrait series aired a piece on the case for the 60th anniversary of George's death. The programme included interviews with George's surviving sister Katherine Stinney Robinson. It also included an interview with Lorraine Bailey, the surviving sister of Betty June Binnicker. The programme drew national attention to the case for the first time in decades. In the years that followed, filmmaker Ray Brown began production on a documentary titled '83 Days.' Historians, journalists, and civil-rights lawyers began, slowly, to reassemble what remained of the record. Three of George's siblings — Amie, Charles, and Katherine — were still alive. They had waited sixty years for anyone in a position of institutional power to ask them what they knew about the morning of March 23, 1944.
14. Sixty Years of Silence
15. Amie Ruffner
56 sec.
2009. Amie Ruffner, formerly Amie Stinney — George's younger sister. She was eight years old on March 23, 1944. She had…
2009. Amie Ruffner, formerly Amie Stinney — George's younger sister. She was eight years old on March 23, 1944. She had been in the family's yard alongside George on the afternoon Betty June and Mary Emma rode past. She had witnessed the brief conversation about wildflowers. She had, by her own subsequent account, remained with George for the rest of the afternoon. In 1944, she was not called as a witness at his trial. Defense counsel did not interview her. In 2009 — 65 years after the events — she signed a sworn legal affidavit. The affidavit stated that George could not have been away from her during the window in which the crime occurred. It was the first formal alibi statement ever entered into the record on his behalf. It would become one of the central documentary bases for the 2014 petition to vacate the conviction. She was, at that point, the last living witness to the afternoon of the crime who had known George Stinney Jr. personally. An eight-year-old girl had watched, in 1944, as her older brother was taken from her yard and never returned. Sixty-five years later, she gave the testimony no one in the state of South Carolina had ever asked her for.
15. Amie Ruffner
16. The Lawyers
1 min. 5 sec.
2009 to 2013. Sumter and Manning, South Carolina. Attorney Matt Burgess of the Sumter firm Burgess, Wilkinson and McKenz…
2009 to 2013. Sumter and Manning, South Carolina. Attorney Matt Burgess of the Sumter firm Burgess, Wilkinson and McKenzie took on the case pro bono. He was joined by his partner Steven McKenzie, and by attorney Ray Chandler. The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University School of Law filed an amicus brief. Their chosen legal instrument was the writ of coram nobis. Coram nobis is a writ inherited from English common law. It permits a court to correct fundamental errors of fact in cases where no other remedy is available. It is very rarely granted in the modern American legal system. In a case where the defendant has been dead for seven decades, it is almost never sought. The team assembled the affidavits — Amie Ruffner's, Charles Stinney's, Katherine Stinney Robinson's. They engaged Dr Amanda Salas as their forensic psychiatric expert. They filed the petition with the Third Judicial Circuit in 2013. The petition was heard by Circuit Judge Carmen Tevis Mullen — a judge with a reputation as thorough, careful, and legally conservative, who granted extraordinary relief only when she was fully convinced.
16. The Lawyers
17. January 2014 — The Hearing
58 sec.
January 21–22, 2014. Sumter, South Carolina. Third Judicial Circuit. The evidentiary hearing on the petition to vacate t…
January 21–22, 2014. Sumter, South Carolina. Third Judicial Circuit. The evidentiary hearing on the petition to vacate the conviction of George Stinney Jr. was convened. Presiding: Circuit Judge Carmen Tevis Mullen. For the petitioners: Matt Burgess, Steven McKenzie, Ray Chandler. For the state: Third Circuit Solicitor Ernest 'Chip' Finney III. Testimony was given by three of George's surviving siblings — Amie Ruffner, Charles Stinney, and Katherine Stinney Robinson. Expert testimony was given by forensic psychiatrist Dr Amanda Salas. Members of the 1944 search party — those still living — also gave testimony. The state argued the original verdict should stand — that the 1944 court had done what it had believed to be right at the time. The Binnicker and Thames families, through counsel, opposed the petition. Judge Mullen took the entire hearing under advisement. She adjourned court without indicating when she would rule. For eleven months she wrote. She reviewed every document. She reviewed every affidavit. She reviewed the 1944 newspaper record and the psychiatric assessments.
17. January 2014 — The Hearing
18. December 17, 2014
1 min. 14 sec.
A courtroom in Sumter. Amie Ruffner was 78 years old. Katherine Stinney Robinson was 79. Charles Stinney was 77. They ha…
A courtroom in Sumter. Amie Ruffner was 78 years old. Katherine Stinney Robinson was 79. Charles Stinney was 77. They had been waiting seventy years. Judge Mullen issued her ruling. The 1944 conviction of George Junius Stinney Jr. was vacated. Her order was 29 pages. It found fundamental Constitutional violations of due process in the 1944 prosecution. It found that the defense counsel had provided ineffective assistance. It found that the alleged confession, in the circumstances under which it was obtained, could not be said to have been knowing and voluntary. It found that the interrogation methods used were inherently coercive given the defendant's age and the setting. It granted the writ of coram nobis. It vacated the 1944 conviction and sentence. The ruling did not adjudicate factual guilt or innocence — Judge Mullen was explicit on this point. It ruled only on the constitutional integrity of the 1944 proceedings. 'I can think of no greater injustice,' the order stated, 'than the violation of one's Constitutional rights.' George Stinney Jr. had been dead for 70 years and 6 months.
18. December 17, 2014
19. The Two Families
54 sec.
The Stinney family had waited seventy years. The Binnicker and Thames families had also waited seventy years — for a dif…
The Stinney family had waited seventy years. The Binnicker and Thames families had also waited seventy years — for a different answer. The 2014 ruling gave them different truths. It gave neither of them peace. The Stinney family's response to the ruling was measured. Amie Ruffner, Charles Stinney, and Katherine Stinney Robinson expressed gratitude — and grief. They noted that the ruling could not bring their brother back. They noted that they had lived their entire adult lives under the shadow of an execution they had never accepted. The Binnicker and Thames families — represented by descendants of the two murdered girls — publicly disagreed with the ruling. They stated their continued belief in George Stinney Jr.'s guilt. They expressed concern that the exoneration would be interpreted as closing a case they still considered unresolved. Judge Mullen had, in her order, been explicit that the ruling did not adjudicate factual guilt or innocence. But an exoneration on due-process grounds, in practice, functions as a legal exoneration. The two families' grief — for very different losses — was, in that moment, incompatible. It remains one of the hardest ethical facts about the case, and one that reporting on it must not paper over.
19. The Two Families
20. What Was Vacated
1 min. 6 sec.
December 17, 2014 and afterward. The vacated conviction did not bring George Stinney Jr. back. It did not identify the a…
December 17, 2014 and afterward. The vacated conviction did not bring George Stinney Jr. back. It did not identify the actual killer of Betty June Binnicker or Mary Emma Thames. It did not compensate his family, punish those responsible, or reopen the 1944 investigation. It did do this — it corrected the official record. In the archives of the state of South Carolina, the youngest person executed in America in the twentieth century is now listed as a child whose conviction has been formally vacated on constitutional grounds. The Stinney family placed a headstone on his grave in the years following the ruling. The state penitentiary where he was executed was demolished in 1999. The site is now a mixed-use development in downtown Columbia. The case is now taught in American law schools as a standard illustration of due-process failure and the fragility of the writ of coram nobis. Amie Ruffner died in 2019. Katherine Stinney Robinson died in 2015, a year after the ruling. Charles Stinney died in 2018. Three siblings lived just long enough to see the state acknowledge what had been done. Betty June and Mary Emma's actual killer was never found. What remains is what a courtroom in Sumter did on a December morning in 2014 — the smallest kind of correction, entered seventy years too late, into a record that should never have needed correcting. It is not justice. It is not closure. It is only, finally, the truth.
20. What Was Vacated

1. Alcolu, 1944

2. George Junius Stinney Jr.

3. Betty June and Mary Emma

4. The Search Party

5. The Casual Remark

6. The Interrogation

7. The Family Exiled

8. The Courthouse in Manning

9. The Ten Minutes

10. The Empty Record

11. The 83 Days

12. The Morning of June 16, 1944

13. The Rumor

14. Sixty Years of Silence

15. Amie Ruffner

16. The Lawyers

17. January 2014 — The Hearing

18. December 17, 2014

19. The Two Families

20. What Was Vacated