Life

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

When I was fourteen years old, there wasn’t a football pass I couldn’t catch, a pretty girl I wouldn’t hope to catch. My mother was dead three months; her death taught me how much I wanted to live.

George Stinney was fourteen too when he learned how much he wanted to live.

Seventy-eight years and one month ago, the state of South Carolina taught him that lesson when it strapped him into an ill-fitting electric chair made for bigger folk and pushed five thousand three hundred eighty volts through his little body. I won’t show you the picture of the large white hands adjusting the strap of the outsize metal cap under which George’s small black face is scrunched tight in tears moments before.

They said he’d murdered two even younger white girls after the oldest, eleven, refused to have sex with him, and the youngest, seven, refused to leave so he could have sex with the other girl. Murdered them and left them in a ditch.

There was scarce evidence that he’d done that. He became a suspect when he joined a search for the missing girls and told another searcher he’d spoken to them the day before. A black boy speaking with white girls. Police officers who interrogated the boy for hours without parents or lawyer testified George admitted the killings. There was no written and signed confession; the alleged verbal confession came after the boy was told he would be given an ice cream cone if he’d admit it. George liked ice cream.

His trial for murder lasted less than some traffic tickets I’ve litigated. It took an all-white jury just about ten minutes to decide hell, yes, this black boy should die for what he did to those white girls.

Seventy years later another judge decided he’d done nothing to those white girls other than try to help find them.

George Stinney’s conviction was vacated.

The fourteen-year-old boy, who liked ice cream and wanted to live, was just as dead.