George Junius Stinney Jr. (October 21, 1929 – June 16, 1944) was a boy who, at the age of 14, was convicted and then executed in a proceeding later vacated as an unfair trial for the murders of two young white girls in March 1944 – Betty June Binnicker, age 11, and Mary Emma Thames, age 8 – in his hometown of Alcolu, South Carolina. He was convicted, sentenced to death, and executed by electric chair in June 1944, thus becoming the youngest American with an exact birth date confirmed to be both sentenced to death and executed in the 20th century. [3] A re-examination of Stinney's case began in 2004, and several individuals and the Northeastern University School of Law sought a judicial review. Stinney's murder conviction was vacated in 2014, seventy years after he was executed, with a South Carolina court ruling that he had not received a fair trial, and was thus
This young boy was George Junius Stinney, Jr. who falsely accused for murder on two white girls. George is innocent from this criminal because there was lack of evidences, unfair trials, and time of murders. The time of the crime is impossible for George to commit murder
He accused Charlie Weems and Clarence Norris of raping Price and Bates. Despite him later claiming his statements were coerced, his own trial ended in eleven jurors voting for a death sentence and one seeking life in prison. He spent the next six years in jail without a retrial before finally
1) On August 28, 1986, a woman named Queen Madge White was found dead in her home in Rome, Georgia. She was a 79-year-old widow and was found to be beaten, sexually assaulted, and strangled to death. Her home had also been burglarized. Timothy Foster, an 18-year-old black male, confessed to the crime and officers recovered some of the stolen items from Foster’s home. The State subsequently indicted him for malice, murder, and burglary and the jury that was selected convicted him of capital murder and assigned the death penalty.
Johnson became a suspect when a witness claimed that he saw him carrying a leather strap, though Johnson denied owning one. Johnson provided numerous alibi witnesses at trial. Nevertheless, he was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death. While the U.S. Supreme Court granted a stay of execution, a mob broke through the jail and brutally murdered Johnson in a public hanging. Johnson’s tombstone reflects his professed innocence, “God Bless you all.
"A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial" by Suzanne Lebsock is a compelling and thought-provoking book that explores the murder of Lucy Pollard, a white woman, in 1895 in rural Virginia. The book offers a detailed examination of the trial and the events that followed, shedding light on the complexities of race, gender, and justice in the American South during this time period. The author retells the events leading up to the murder, the investigation, and the trial. The book offers insight into the legal system at the time, including the role of juries, the prosecution and defense, and the role of the press.
Even after the McMillian case was denied countless times, Stevenson and Walter never gave up hope, and it paid off. Walter McMillian was released after six years on death row. Stevenson said, “But Walter’s case also taught me something else: there is light within this darkness” (28). Stevenson saw hope as light, as it shined brightly even when Walter’s life was on the line. Stevenson also learned through his time that you don't just hope for yourself, you hope for others, too.
In Just Mercy, when a young lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, takes on Walter McMilians, a man who was wrongfully convicted for murder, Stevenson also conducts a thorough investigation. Even though Walter is already in jail, when Stevenson takes on his case, he starts at the beginning of the entire federal criminal process. Stevenson makes sure to review all aspects of Walters' case, before making any judgements. Even though his family had already made statements, Stevenson visits Walter and his family to get a sense of who he was and his whereabouts on the day of the murder. He listened to “testimonials about Walter, the town, race, the police, the trial” (pg. 1).
Even though it’s nonfiction, it reads much like a fiction novel would, getting comparisons to ¬To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. What makes it even more compelling than the fictional novel is that these are the stories of real people, of those wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced. Stevenson’s memoir truly shows the power of mercy and what it can do for those wronged by judiciaries. This book’s story of justice and redemption and Stevenson’s struggle to free convicts from unjust or excessive punishment is deeply moving and powerful. The reader will root for him as he struggles to do as much as he can for the accused.
This is where the importance of Bryan Stevenson's organization in events has importance. After giving details in the background of cases he is able to talk about cases of not criminals but people with their own stories. Bryan Stevenson talks about the way the mental illness of Mr. Jenkins was never looked into by his previous lawyers. Stevenson says “His lawyers did no investigation of Mr.Jenkin’s history prior to trial, and he was quickly convicted of murder and sentenced to death.” (171)
The author Bryan Stevenson teaches his audience about criminal and racial discrimination in judicial systems using his own firsthand knowledge of devastating occurrences, and references in the nonfiction novel Just Mercy. The stories that Stevenson tells are all examples of how the legal system has been corrupted. Firstly, Stevenson uses ethos throughout his prose to provide an individual's perspective on America's racial injustices. Stevenson is a civil rights lawyer who shares personal experiences with injustice.. When Stevenson states, "I've represented abused and neglected children who were prosecuted as adults,"(9)
These lawyers cared more about pinning the crime on someone and closing the case, than actually figuring out who committed the crime. Stevenson represents cases in a way that shows how critical and important it is for the court to truly think about their decisions. Stevenson states that: "The Court's ruling had become increasingly hostile to death row prisoners and less committed to the notion that 'death is different,' requiring more careful review" (Stevenson 78). The court system and the conduct of: police men, lawyers, judges, and juries, had become so strayed from the path of justice that the court system would rather kill then try to save a persons life. Instead of allowing a retrial of someone who had inadequate legal representation or had mental disabilities the court simply wanted to let them die.
As a young adult Mr. Stevenson had a high advantage to his education, " In, 1983, I was a twenty-three-year-old student at Harvard Law School working in Georgia on an internship, eager and in experience and worried that I was in over my head " (Stevenson 3) which would eventually pave the road to his success. 1985, he became a graduate with a masters in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government and a J.D. from the School of Law ("Bryan Stevenson"). As his first law firm was the clinical faculty at New York University School of Law. As he began to get cases he acclaimed more publicity. " Trying to stop an execution would mean nonstop work eighteen hours a day for a month, desperately trying to get a stay order from a court " (Stevenson 73).
The white people of the city were upset, but not completely outraged, about the killing of a white man by a black man. About a month later, George Richardson, a black citizen as well, was “suspected of the rape of a white woman, Mabel Hallam,
Have word got around about the free help Mr. Stevenson was offering to those on death row people started to want his help for other reasons; such as life imprisonment convictions. The cases began to overwhelm the staff at the EJI, but they worked everyday to get more convictions overturned and sentences reduced. They also began to work on the prison conditions around the United States and try to get justice for those brutally assaulted or raped in
