A South Carolina lawmaker wants the state to pay for those people it wrongfully executes, beginning with the family of George Stinney.
A bill filed in the House of Representatives ahead of the upcoming legislative session would establish the George Stinney Fund, which would provide $10 million to families of those exonerated after being executed, no matter how much time has lapsed.
The bill is named for the 14-year-old Black teen convicted in the brutal murder of 2 White girls in Clarendon County and executed by electrocution in June 1944.
A judge vacated Stinney’s conviction in 2014, finding numerous instances of his constitutional rights being violated, from his arrest to an hours-long trial and conviction by an all-White jury only months after the girls were found dead.
“We can’t do justice, because justice would be us resurrecting Mr. Stinney and allowing him to have a good life,” said state Rep. Cezar McKnight, D-Kingstree, who sponsored the bill. “But what we can do is atone for what we’ve done, and that’s what we need to do.”
McKnight said he was moved to author the bill during a ceremony to unveil a portrait for Judge Clifton Newman in the Williamsburg County Courthouse.
Newman remarked that he was honored by the portrait but not that it would share space with a picture of Judge Phillip Stoll, who presided over Stinney’s trial and sentenced him to death.
Funding for the measure, co-sponsored by Greenville Republican Mike Burns and Orangeburg Democrat Gilda Cobb-Hunter, would be created with $10 million from a Department of Administration reserve fund.
The money would be awarded in the form of a grant application to the family of anyone executed and later exonerated by a court in South Carolina, regardless of when.
Circuit Judge Carmen Mullen, in overturning Stinney’s conviction, wrote that significant progress had been made toward racial equality in the years after Stinney’s death.
“Regardless of that progress, from time to time we are called to look back to examine our still-recent history and correct injustice when possible,” Mullen wrote.
South Carolina made headlines in 2021 when lawmakers passed a bill allowing prison officials to execute death-row inmates by electric chair or firing squad amid a shortage in drugs used in lethal injection.
In a debate over the bill in April, McKnight said he agreed with the death penalty in principle but that he opposed the state carrying out executions because of cases of people known to have been wrongfully executed or where there was significant doubt over their guilt.
“It’s not one of those black-and-white issues, because I can’t sit here and tell you that I wouldn’t want someone executed for harming a loved one of mine,” McKnight told The Post and Courier. “But by the same token, we don’t have the ability to resurrect people that we execute, so I’ve got some trepidations about it. I just do.”
Source: The Post and Courier, Staff, December 31, 2021
🚩 | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com.
 |  |
Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE!
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde