New evidence, old wounds in SC execution case

The town, however, is haunted by much more than real estate relics. In late March 1944, Mary Emma Thames, 7, and Betty June Binnicker, 11, went missing while out riding their bikes, searching for wildflowers. The bodies of the two were found the next day partly submerged in a drainage ditch, both suffering fatal, crushing blows to their skulls. George Stinney, reportedly the last person to see the girls as he tended to his family’s cow when they stopped to ask for directions, quickly became the prime suspect and was taken in for questioning by police. They held Stinney for five days, then charged him after they said he confessed to the girls’ murders. At his trial, no physical evidence was presented, and jurors reportedly deliberated only 10 minutes before sentencing him to the electric chair, making him the youngest person executed in the U.S. in the last century.

New evidence, however, has prompted attorneys in the state to file a motion to clear Stinney’s name as they head to court Tuesday seeking a posthumous exoneration.

“If you questioned anybody, they were very tight about the story,” with insinuations that there was more to it, the Rev. James Hudley told Al Jazeera America. For 23 years, Hudley served as pastor of Alcolu’s Green Hill Missionary Baptist Church, known locally as “the black church.” The neat white sanctuary sits on a boundary line of sorts, across the street from the long-closed-down lumber mill reclaimed by overgrowth and on the edge of an open farm field of freshly tilled soil. The girls’ bodies were found about 300 yards from its back door. Hudley first heard about the murders about two decades ago and says churchgoers were reluctant to speak about it.

The fear for their personal safety that kept them from speaking in Stinney’s defense 70 years ago left lingering feelings of guilt in the community, Hudley said. “I never try to push them because I felt that there was fear that if you talked too much, the wrong people would get the message” and provoke local intimidation, he said. “It put a lot of fright into the black population of Alcolu. I feel that even today that fright is still there.” 

Just off Interstate 95, Alcolu sits five miles from Manning, the county seat of Clarendon County, where racial struggles proved a flash point on a historical level. In 1947, during the heart of school segregation, black families in the county pushed for a school bus for their children but were denied. The case later became part of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case ruling in 1954, which ended segregation in public schools across the U.S.

“You open the door of a posthumous 70-year-old case of murder with these procedural issues in it, you might as well go buy a lottery ticket,” Chandler said. “We’re taking a leap, and we know it.”

Memory of Jim Crow racism in the state is still fresh for Dr. Lonnie Randolph, president of the South Carolina state conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. As a boy, he watched his grandmother sit in the back of city buses and his father — a World War II veteran — sit in segregated waiting rooms at the Veterans Administration hospital. Those experiences were compounded when he first heard about Stinney’s execution as a teenager.

“I do what I do today because of those horrible experiences I had in this state as a child,” he said. But disparity still exists for African-Americans encountering the judicial system in the state, he argued. “What can we do today to make this unfair system of so-called justice in this state serve all people in a fair and just manner?” 

About two-thirds of South Carolina’s prisoners are black, as are 27 of its 46 inmates currently sitting on death row.

Race has always played a role in the death penalty, sometimes blatantly, Richard Dieter, executive director of Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit watchdog based in Washington, D.C., said in an email. Punishments have varied along racial lines, with blacks receiving stiffer penalties. In rape capital cases, for example, almost all those executed were black while almost all the victims were white, he said.

"The biggest influence of race is that defendants are much more likely to receive the death penalty if the victim in their crime was white than if the victim was black,” Dieter said. Murders in the black community, however, are less likely to be pursued as capital cases, he added.

“It's important that the government officially recognizes that mistakes have been made,” he said. “This sends a clear message to the public that information in the future might change the convictions of the present.”