community went searching for the missing girls. Young George and his siblings joined the search party. At some point, George mentioned to one of the white adult searchers that he and his sister had seen the girls earlier in the day. The girls had approached them while they were playing outside and asked where they could find flowers.
The next day, the dead bodies of the girls were found in a shallow ditch. George was immediately arrested for the murders because he had admitted seeing the girls before they disappeared and was the last person to see them alive. He was subjected to hours of interrogation without his parents or an attorney present. The understandable anger about the death of the girls exploded when word circulated that a black boy had been arrested for the murders. The sheriff claimed that George had confessed to the murders, though no written or signed statement was presented. George’s father was summarily fired from his job; his family was told to leave town or else they would be lynched. Out of fear for their lives, George’s family fled town late that night, leaving George behind in jail with no family support. Within hours of announcing the alleged confession, a lynch mob formed at the jailhouse in Alcolu, but the fourteen-year-old had already been moved to a jail in Charleston.
A month later, a trial was convened. Facing charges of first-degree murder, George sat alone in front of an estimated crowd of fifteen hundred white people who had packed the courtroom and surrounded the building. No African Americans were allowed inside the courthouse. George’s white court-appointed attorney, a tax lawyer with political aspirations, called no witnesses. The prosecution’s only evidence was the sheriff’s testimony regarding George’s alleged confession. The trial was over in a few hours. An all-white jury deliberated for ten minutes before convicting George of rape and murder. Judge Stoll promptly sentenced the fourteen-year-old to death. George’s lawyer said there would be no appeal because his family didn’t have the money to pay for it.
Despite appeals from the NAACP and black clergy, who asked that the sentence be converted to life imprisonment, Governor Olin Johnston refused to intervene and George was sent to Columbia to be executed in South Carolina’s electric chair. Small even for his age, the five foot two, ninety-two-pound Stinney walked up to the chair with a Bible in his hand. He had to sit on the book when prison staff couldn’t fit the electrodes to his small frame. Alone in the room, with no family or any people of color present, the terrified child sat in the oversized electric chair. He frantically searched the room for someone to help but saw only law enforcement personnel and reporters. The adult-size mask slid off George’s face when the first jolt of electricity struck his body. Witnesses to the execution could see his “wide open, tearful eyes and saliva dripping from his mouth.” Eighty-one days after being approached by two young girls about where flowers might be found, George Stinney was pronounced dead. Years later, rumors surfaced that a white man from a prominent family confessed on his deathbed to killing the girls. Recently, an effort has been launched to exonerate George Stinney.
The Stinney execution was horrific and heartbreaking, but it reflected the racial politics of the South more than the way children accused of crimes were generally treated. It was an example of how policies and norms once directed exclusively at controlling and punishing the black population have filtered their way into our general criminal justice system. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the politics of fear and anger sweeping the country and fueling mass incarceration was turning its attention to children.
Influential criminologists predicted a coming wave of “super-predators” with whom the juvenile justice system would be unable to cope. Sometimes expressly focusing on black and brown children, theorists suggested that America would soon be overcome by “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and who “have absolutely no respect for human life.” Panic over the impending crime wave expected from these “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless” children led nearly every state to enact legislation that increased the exposure of children to adult prosecution. Many states lowered or eliminated the minimum age for trying children as adults, leaving children as young as eight vulnerable to adult prosecution and imprisonment.
Some states also initiated mandatory transfer rules, which took away any discretion from prosecutors and judges over whether a child should be kept