Pursuing Justice for All by Charles M. Blow for the NYTimes.com

Pursuing Justice for All by Charles M. Blow for the NYTimes.com:

justtrynakeepup:

He is prisoner No. 260. He stares into the camera for his mug shot, head cocked, eyes forlorn of hope. It is the kind of picture that haunts.

He is 14. His name is George Stinney Jr. He is a child, someone’s baby.

He is a black boy arrested in the murder of two white girls in the rural town of Alcolu, S.C.

He is tried for the murders just a month after the arrest. An all-white, all-male jury is empaneled. That same afternoon, the trial commences. It lasts only a few hours. The white lawyer assigned to Stinney’s defense cross-examines no witnesses and calls none of his own. The jury deliberates for only 10 minutes before finding Stinney guilty. That same day, the boy is sentenced to death by electrocution.

There are no appeals. There are no requests for a stay. When the day comes for the boy’s execution, less than two months after the trial, guards reportedly had a hard time fitting the small boy into the big chair.

He was just 5 feet 1 inch. As Laura Bradley wrote in Slate, “He weighed 95 pounds when he was arrested, and was so small he had to sit on a phone book in the electric chair when he was executed within three months of the murders.”

Some say the book he sat on wasn’t a phone book but the Bible.

(Note to humanity: When the person in your death machine requires a booster seat, maybe you should reconsider what you are about to do.)

As Jesse Wegman of The Times’s editorial board wrote on the Taking Note blog: “Reports from the execution chamber said he was so small that the jolt of electricity knocked the mask from his face.”

That day, June 16, 1944, Stinney became the youngest person executed in America in the 20th century. This unconscionable cruelty — the execution of children — used to be routine. As The Times pointed out in 2005, in the 1940s juveniles were executed at a pace of “nearly once every two months.”

It’s not clear whether Stinney saw the faces of anyone who loved him when he was marched into that execution chamber and strapped into that chair. His sister, Aime Ruffner, told The Guardian this year that the family was run out of town the day her brother was taken away. She is quoted as saying: “I never went back there. I curse that place. It was the destruction of my family and the killing of my brother.”

Last week, a South Carolina judge threw out the conviction, saying “I can think of no greater injustice than a violation of one’s constitutional rights, which has been proven to me in this case” and finding “by a preponderance of the evidence standard, that a violation of the defendant’s procedural due process rights tainted his prosecution.”

This was a victory of sorts: a 70-years-too-late admission that the justice system failed that black child, and that the failure culminated — in short order — in the taking of his life. Yet something about it feels hollow and discomforting, like the thunder that rolls long after the lightning has cracked the sky and split the tree.

…

The overturning of this particular conviction comes at a most profound time — following the decisions by grand juries not to indict police officers in the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and John Crawford III and preceding the ambush and murder of two police officers in Brooklyn

The decision provides a generational through-line of sorts for questions about judicial fairness in this country, about the speed with which people can be judged a threat or an enemy and have their lives taken.

The heart aches for every life lost.

Why are there so many touchstones of outrage to mark the African-American experience in this country? Why is there so much tension between officers of the law and minority neighborhoods?

…

All lives are valuable — those of the public and the police. We can and must condemn the deranged suicidal cop killer (who also shot his former girlfriend) as well as the cops who kill. There is no contradiction there. Humanity is the common thread.

The cries of ancestors mingle with those of activists and those of dead officers. Anguish stretches across generations and across the racial gulf. Equal justice demands its proper place. The taking of life on both sides of the badge must be redressed.

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