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Someone on Facebook posted a link to an AP story from last year, about a 14 year old boy named George Stinney Jr who was executed in South Carolina in 1944.
From the piece: “In a South Carolina prison 65 years ago, guards walked a 14-year-old boy, Bible tucked under his arm, to the electric chair. At 95 pounds, the straps don’t fit, and an electrode was too big for his leg.”
“The switch was pulled and the death mask fell from George Stinney’s face. Tears streamed from his eyes. Witnesses recoiled in horror as they watched the youngest person executed in the United States in the past century die.”
Which is why we need to do what other civilized(!) countries have done – abolish the death penalty! You can’t convince me that an innocent person hasn’t been put to death in the past; look at all the people the Innocence Project has freed.
At least we no longer put children to death – a very small saving grace.
Very sad.
In Clinton, Ontario, back in 1959, a 14 year-old boy named Steven Truscott was arrested, tried and convicted of killing a 12 year-old schoolmate. He was completely innocent but admitted only to having given the girl a ride on his bike that evening. He, in actuality, had nothing to do with her death. Steven was sentenced “to hang until dead” and was incarcerated at first in the local jail. Years later when he was interviewed on TV, he said he remembered hearing sawing and hammering outside his jail cell and thinking that they were building the gallows to hang him that day. It made me cry a little when I heard that. Can you imagine how completely alone and abandoned he must have felt? To make a very long story short, his death sentence was eventually commuted to life and Steven was released after serving 10 years, I think. Just within the past few years, he was completely cleared of all charges and received a few million dollars in compensation. No one else was ever arrested for the girl’s murder. The last execution in Canada was in 1962. Capital punishment was officially abolished in Canada, I’m happy to say.
Sorry this was so long.
Yay Canada!! (And not too long at all.)
And yeah, exactly Karen.