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attempted murder in Florida serve less than ten years in prison. Gun violence with no
reported injuries frequently result in sentences of less than ten years for adult defendants,
even in this era of harsh punishments.
Children who commit serious crimes long have been vulnerable to adult prosecution and
punishment in many states, but the development of juvenile justice systems has meant that
most child offenders were sent to juvenile detention facilities. Juvenile justice systems vary
across the United States, but most states would have kept Trina, Ian, or Antonio in juvenile
custody until they turned eighteen or twenty-one. At most, they might have stayed in custody
until age twenty-five or older, if their institutional history or juvenile detention record
suggested that they were still a threat to public safety.
In an earlier era, if you were thirteen or fourteen when you committed a crime, you would
find yourself in the adult system with a lengthy sentence only if the crime was unusually
high-profile—or committed by a black child against a white person in the South. For instance,
in the infamous Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930 s, two of the defendants, Roy Wright and
Eugene Williams, were just thirteen years old when they were wrongfully convicted of rape
and sentenced to death in Alabama.
In another signature case of juvenile prosecution, George Stinney, a fourteen-year-old black
boy, was executed by the State of South Carolina on June 16 , 1944. Three months earlier,
two young white girls who lived nearby in Alcolu, a small mill town where the races were
separated by railroad tracks, had gone out to pick flowers and never returned home. Scores of
people across the community went searching for the missing girls. Young George and his
siblings joined the search party. At some point, George mentioned to one of the white adult
searchers that he and his sister had seen the girls earlier in the day. The girls had approached
them while they were playing outside and asked where they could find flowers.
The next day, the dead bodies of the girls were found in a shallow ditch. George was
immediately arrested for the murders because he had admitted seeing the girls before they
disappeared and was the last person to see them alive. He was subjected to hours of
interrogation without his parents or an attorney present. The understandable anger about the
death of the girls exploded when word circulated that a black boy had been arrested for the
murders. The sheriff claimed that George had confessed to the murders, though no written or
signed statement was presented. George’s father was summarily fired from his job; his family
was told to leave town or else they would be lynched. Out of fear for their lives, George’s
family fled town late that night, leaving George behind in jail with no family support. Within
hours of announcing the alleged confession, a lynch mob formed at the jailhouse in Alcolu,
but the fourteen-year-old had already been moved to a jail in Charleston.
A month later, a trial was convened. Facing charges of first-degree murder, George sat
alone in front of an estimated crowd of fifteen hundred white people who had packed the
courtroom and surrounded the building. No African Americans were allowed inside the
courthouse. George’s white court-appointed attorney, a tax lawyer with political aspirations,
called no witnesses. The prosecution’s only evidence was the sheriff’s testimony regarding
George’s alleged confession. The trial was over in a few hours. An all-white jury deliberated
for ten minutes before convicting George of rape and murder. Judge Stoll promptly sentenced
the fourteen-year-old to death. George’s lawyer said there would be no appeal because his
family didn’t have the money to pay for it.