0812994523.pdf

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
1980 s and early 1990 s, 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 in the juvenile system. Tens of
thousands of children who had previously been managed by the juvenile justice system, with
its well-developed protections and requirements for children, were now thrown into an
increasingly overcrowded, violent, and desperate adult prison system.
The predictions of “super-predators” proved wildly inaccurate. The juvenile population in
America increased from 1994 to 2000 , but the juvenile crime rate declined, leading
academics who had originally supported the “super-predator” theory to disclaim it. In 2001 ,
the surgeon general of the United States released a report labeling the “super-predator”
theory a myth and stated that “[t]here is no evidence that young people involved in violence
during the peak years of the early 1990 s were more frequent or more vicious offenders than
youths in earlier years.” This admission came too late for kids like Trina, Ian, and Antonio.
Their death-in-prison sentences were insulated from legal challenges or appeals by a maze of
procedural rules, statutes of limitations, and legal barricades designed to make successful
postconviction challenges almost impossible.