Folk Figure. He is credited, as a fourteen-year-old, for being the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century. Stinney, a 90-pound African-American youth from South Carolina, was convicted in a two-hour trial of the first-degree murder of two pre-teen white girls: 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker, and 7-year-old Mary Emma Thames. However, no physical evidence existed in the case, and the sole evidence against Stinney was the circumstantial fact that the girls had spoken with Stinney and his sister on the 24th of March shortly before the murders, and the testimony of three police officers that Stinney had confessed, yet there was no written or signed statement of the confession. After a mob lynching was attempted on March 26th, his family had to escape the city in fear of their lives being taken. Not one single witness was called by his lawyer, Charles Plowden, who specialized in tax preparations instead of criminal law. An all-white jury deliberated for ten minutes before convicting George Stinney of rape and murder, and the judge promptly sentenced the fourteen-year-old to death. He was executed by electric chair. No Black people were allowed in the courthouse during the trial. Since Stinney's conviction and execution, the question of his guilt, the validity of his confession, and the judicial process leading to his execution have been criticized as "suspicious at best and a miscarriage of justice at worst." On December 17, 2014, his conviction was posthumously vacated 70 years after his execution as he was denied due process, which is guaranteed by the 5th and 14th Amendments to the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution. This leaves the unanswered question of who actually murdered these two little girls.