George Stinney was executed at 14: more than 70 years later, his family in South Carolina is trying to prove that he was innocent of murder and the victim of a racist justice system in the Jim Crow South.

• Author: Wegman, Jesse
• Position: NATIONAL

According to the official 1944 sentencing report, George Stinney Jr. was "legally electrocuted." But to call what happened to him legal is to say only that the 14-year-old black boy's fate was decided in a courtroom, by a judge and jury, rather than by a throng of angry men with a rope.

In truth, George Stinney was lynched in slow motion in the Jim Crow-era South. On March 24,1944, George was arrested and charged with the murder of two young white girls, Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, 7. They had been found beaten to death in a ditch in rural Clarendon County, South Carolina.

A month later, he was tried and found guilty. He was executed on June 16, 1944--the youngest person put to death in the U.S. in the 20th century. (In 2005, the Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional for minors.) At just 95 pounds, he was so small that the guards struggled to strap him to the electric chair before he was electrocuted.

The lawyer representing George had never represented a criminal defendant before and called no witnesses in his defense. The trial lasted just three hours, followed by a 10-minute deliberation by the jury that sentenced him to die.

"I don't think they cared whether he was guilty or innocent," says Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, which represents poor death-penalty defendants. "If they had proof-positive evidence that he was not guilty, I don't think that would've changed anything."

Unconstitutional Trial?

There's strong evidence that George Stinney was in fact innocent, and that his prosecution was riddled with unconstitutional errors and misconduct. Last January, a group of lawyers and civil rights advocates argued before a South Carolina court to either retry or exonerate him, 70 years after his execution. The court hasn't yet ruled on the petition.

"When I looked at the case and what was there and studied it, it was appalling," says Miller Shealy Jr., one of the lawyers helping the Stinney family in their quest to clear George's name.

According to one of George's sisters, Amie Ruffner, she and George were together all afternoon on the day of the murders, and had encountered the two girls only briefly. But the authorities never spoke to Amie or any other member of the Stinney family--they had been run out of town on the day of George's arrest.

"My father came home and started packing up stuff to go," says George's other sister, Kathrine Robinson, who was 10 at...