In 1944, South Carolina executed a 14-year-old. He was innocent.

On the morning of June 16, 1944, guards at South Carolina's state penitentiary walked fourteen-year-old George Junius Stinney Jr. to the electric chair. He weighed approximately 90 pounds and stood just over five feet tall — so small that the guards struggled to properly strap him into the apparatus. He was the youngest person executed in the United States in the twentieth century. He had been convicted and sentenced to death in a single day.

George Stinney had lived in Alcolu, South Carolina, a small, segregated mill town where racial divisions shaped every aspect of daily life. He was Black, the son of George Junius Stinney Sr. and Aimé Brown Stinney, and he had grown up in a community where his family had no legal protection and no political power worth speaking of. The machinery of the white-run state had never been designed to protect people like him. In the spring of 1944, that machinery turned against him completely.

The crime that led to his execution had occurred less than three months earlier. On March 22, 1944, two white girls — eleven-year-old Betty June Binnicker and eight-year-old Mary Emma Thames — went missing while riding their bicycles through Alcolu. Their bodies were discovered in a ditch the following day, showing signs of a brutal beating. The murders sent fear through the community and intensified racial tension in an already volatile environment.

That same afternoon, George and his younger sister Aimé had spoken briefly with the two girls, who had stopped near the Stinney home asking where they might find wildflowers. That ordinary exchange — a few words on a roadside — became the center of the prosecution's case against him. Police arrested George and interrogated him without a parent or legal representative present. He was fourteen years old. Court findings would determine, decades later, that the confession extracted from him was neither knowing nor voluntary. No physical evidence connected him to the murders.

His trial took place on a single day in April 1944 and lasted approximately three hours. The jury, composed entirely of white men, deliberated for ten minutes before returning a guilty verdict and a sentence of death. The court-appointed defense attorney called no witnesses, conducted no meaningful cross-examination of the prosecution's evidence, and filed no appeal. A judge reviewing the case seventy years later would describe the level of representation as the essence of being ineffective.

In the days following George's arrest, the consequences for his family were immediate and total. His father lost his job. The Stinney family was forced out of Alcolu under threats of violence and never returned. George remained incarcerated at the state penitentiary, separated from everyone he knew, until the morning the state carried out its sentence.

Decades passed. In 2009, George's younger sister — Aimé Stinney Ruffner, then 77 years old — filed an affidavit stating that George had been with her that afternoon, tending to the family's cow, during the window in which the murders were believed to have occurred. Another sister, Katherine Stinney Robinson, who had been seven years old in 1944, offered her own account of a brother who could not have done what the state said he did. These testimonies, unavailable at trial because the defense attorney presented nothing at all, pointed toward what many had long suspected: that the state of South Carolina had executed the wrong person, or more precisely, had executed a child without making any serious effort to find out whether he was guilty.

In December 2014, South Carolina Circuit Court Judge Carmen Mullen vacated George Stinney Jr.'s murder conviction. Her ruling identified constitutional violations at every stage of the proceedings — a coerced confession obtained from a child without counsel, a trial that lasted three hours, a defense that did little to nothing to contest the prosecution's case. Of the attorney's performance, she found he had done essentially nothing. Of the case as a whole, she wrote: "I can think of no greater injustice."

The exoneration arrived seventy years too late for George Stinney. But it put a legal name to what had happened — not a tragedy, not a mistake of the era, but the deliberate operation of a system that gave a Black child in Jim Crow South Carolina no real chance from the moment he was arrested. Today, the execution of minors is constitutionally prohibited in the United States. On June 16, 1944, it was legal, and the state of South Carolina used that legality to execute a fourteen-year-old boy. He has since been exonerated. He cannot be brought back.