By JEFFREY COLLINS
An undated photo provided by the South Carolina Department of Archives and History shows 14-year-old George Stinney Jr., the youngest person ever executed in South Carolina. Sixty-five years later, a community activist is fighting to clear Stinney’s name, saying the young black boy couldn’t have killed two white girls. George Frierson, a 56-year-old school board member and textile inspector, believes Stinney’s confession was coerced, and that his execution was just another injustice blacks suffered in Southern courtrooms in the first half of the 1900s. (AP Photo/South Carolina Department of Archives and History)
George Junius Stinney, Jr., Bruce Hamilton
FILE – In this June 8, 1944 copy of a photo from The Columbia Record, George Stinney, Jr., 14, center right, and Bruce Hamilton, 21, center left, both of Chicora, Ga. enter the death house in the state prison in Columbia, S.C. Both were executed in the state’s electric chair on June 16, 1944. Sixty-five years later, a community activist is fighting to clear Stinney’s name, saying the young black boy couldn’t have killed two white girls. George Frierson, a 56-year-old school board member and textile inspector, believes Stinney’s confession was coerced, and that his execution was just another injustice blacks suffered in Southern courtrooms in the first half of the 1900s. (AP Photo/The Columbia Record, Jimmy Price, File) NO SALES
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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Supporters of a 14-year-old South Carolina boy put to death in the electric chair in 1944 for killing two girls are asking a judge to grant him a new trial.
The family of George Stinney hopes the court hearing will show he is innocent.
The motion says Stinney was convicted on a shaky confession in a segregated society that wanted revenge on a black boy accused of beating to death two white girls, ages 11 and 7 in Clarendon County.
The request includes sworn statements from two of Stinney’s siblings, saying he was around them all day the girls were killed.
Stinney was executed 84 days after the girls disappeared.
Records of Stinney’s confession and other evidence from the trial have disappeared.
