Betty June Binnicker & Mary Emma Thames

Case background and investigation

Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, 8, lived in Alcolu, a segregated mill town in Clarendon County, South Carolina. According to published accounts, the two girls went out on their bicycles on March 22, 1944, looking for flowers, and did not come home. Their bodies were found the next day, March 23, in a ditch.

George Stinney Jr., a 14-year-old Black boy who lived in Alcolu, was taken into custody on March 23. Police said he had confessed, but according to the Death Penalty Information Center no written record of a confession has ever been produced. He was questioned without a parent or lawyer present.

Stinney was tried on April 24, 1944. The whole proceeding, including jury selection, took place in a single day. Accounts collected by the Death Penalty Information Center and the Christian Science Monitor describe a trial of about three hours before an all-white, all-male jury, which returned a guilty verdict after roughly ten minutes. His court-appointed lawyer called few or no witnesses, conducted little cross-examination and filed no appeal. Stinney was executed in the electric chair on June 16, 1944. He is widely described as the youngest person executed in the United States in the twentieth century.

Decades later, members of Stinney's family sought to have the case reopened. His sister gave a sworn statement that she had been with him at the relevant time. Circuit Judge Carmen Mullen issued an order on December 16, 2014, vacating the conviction. She found that Stinney had been denied due process and effective assistance of counsel, and that any confession was likely coerced given his age and the circumstances of his questioning.

The 2014 ruling is often reported as an exoneration. According to the Death Penalty Information Center's summary, the order set aside the conviction because of constitutional violations and did not make a finding about who committed the killings. Stinney's family has always maintained that he was innocent, and, as reported by Facing South, argued that a boy of his size could not physically have committed the killings.

With the conviction vacated and Stinney long dead, there is no standing conviction for the deaths of Betty June Binnicker and Mary Emma Thames. No other person has ever been charged.