70 years ago, a 14-year-old black teenager named George Stinney, was executed by electrocution in the state of South Carolina, USA, for the murder of two young white girls,
It took the all-white jury only 10 minutes to decide whether the young quiet George Stinney was guilty. His defense lawyer made no effort to prove if George Stinney was innocent. No witnesses were called for his defense or no cross examination. His lawyer at the time would not file an appeal on behalf of Stinney.
George Stinney's family had to flee their home before the trial in 1944.
There are now calls for a new trial. Dr Amanda Salas, a forensic psychiatrist, has testified that George Stinny's confession does not match the evidence. Dr Salas stated;“It is my professional opinion to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the confession given by George Stinney on March 24, 1944 is best characterized by a coerced compliant, false confession. It is not reliable.”
An application for a new trial for 14-year-old George Stinney is pending. But surprise, surprise, there are no official records of the original trial.
Why has this taken seventy long years? How does society pardon a corpse? When will the USA admit that the death penalty system has always been, and continues to be, a seriously flawed, riddled with legal errors, corrupt, racist, discriminative, a broken system that is rotten to the very core?
A reminder that in the last forty decades, 143 prisoners have been released from death row in the USA after evidence emerged of their wrongful conviction. Most had spent more than a decade on death row and some had come within hours of being executed. All this in a country that boasts to have the best-of-the-best criminal justice system in the world. How many wrongly convicted people have been wrongly executed is unimaginable?
Read more ... http://thesource.com/2014/01/27/the-youngest-person-in-u-s-to-receive-th...
Read more ... http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-list-those-freed-death-row
