New trial sought for black boy, 14, executed in 1944

A 14-year-old black boy executed nearly 70 years ago is finally getting another day in court, and his lawyers plan to argue Tuesday for a new trial, saying his conviction was tainted by the segregationist-era justice system and scant evidence, the Associated Press reported.

Stinney was found guilty of killing two white girls, 11-year-old Betty Binnicker and 7-year-old Mary Emma Thames, just over a month after their bodies were found beaten in the head and left in a water-filled ditch. The trial lasted less than a day in the tiny Southern mill town of Alcolu, separated, as most were in those days, by race.

Experts say the request it is a long shot because South Carolina law has a high bar to grant new trials. If the judge finds in favor of Stinney, it could open the door for hundreds of other appeals.

But the Stinney case is unique. At 14, he's the youngest person executed in the United States in the past 100 years. Even in 1944, there was an outcry over putting someone so young in the electric chair. Newspaper accounts said the straps in the chair didn't fit around his 95-pound (43-kilogram) body and an electrode was too big for his leg.

Nearly all the evidence, including a confession that was central to the case against Stinney, has disappeared, along with the transcript of the trial.

Lawyers working on behalf of Stinney's family have gathered new evidence, including sworn statements from his relatives accounting for his whereabouts the day the girls were killed and from a pathologist disputing the autopsy findings.

But that evidence depends mostly on the unreliability of the human memory. Stinney's younger sister, who was 7 at the time, testified Tuesday about how she hid in a chicken coop when several white men in uniforms arrived at their home in strange-looking cars.

She vividly remembered seeing her brother's burned body in a casket after his electrocution and the unmarked grave he was buried in. But on cross examination, Amie Ruffner struggled to remember details of a 2009 sworn statement she gave.

The novel decision of whether to give someone executed a new trial will be in the hands of Circuit Judge Carmen Mullen. She said her task isn't deciding whether Stinney is guilty or innocent, but whether he got a fair trial at the time.

“No one here can justify a 14-year-old child being charged, tried, convicted and executed in some 80 days,'' she said.