Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Feb 07, 2016 Countryman, Features / Columnists
By Dennis Nichols
Last year’s decision by President Granger to pardon a number of non-violent prisoners every Independence Day set me thinking about a related matter. Are there wrongly-convicted men and women incarcerated in and
under our penal system?
Our fallible human nature, sometimes distorted sense of justice, and the concept of probability all suggest ‘Yes!’ But it is usually very difficult or impossible to disprove a conviction especially in serious cases like first degree murder or certain sex crimes. Righteous indignation often trumps common sense.
However, we don’t need court trials to remind us of how easily accusations can be made against the innocent.
Yes, the pages of judicial history are littered with agonizing tales of miscarriages of justice. But sometimes you need only look in the mirror to see a person wrongly accused of some misconduct, and feel the hurt of such an allegation, particularly if made by a family member or close friend. Living free in a family or community, one can feel as indignant, angry, or as trapped as a jailbird. And beyond these instances (forever beyond) are those who pay the ultimate price for an act they never committed.
Today I want to share with you two widely-differing examples of wrongful accusation, with a hint of the ramifications on the psyche of the accused and, in the case of one who paid with his life, on his family and the society in which he lived.
In the first example, the ramifications are clear because I was the one accused. In the other, a preponderance of evidence suggests that a travesty of justice had occurred, which was posthumously ‘righted’ 70 years later.
In the space of one week, between December 14th and 21st 1971, I lost both my parents. Suffice to say Christmas that year was a blur of shock and grief. A kindly and obviously God-fearing neighbour became a sort of surrogate mother to me and some of my sisters. I often ran errands for her and confided in her, and she helped guide and counsel me. Shortly after, I began studying for my GCE ‘O’ Levels while still experiencing some emotional trauma. Nevertheless I was successful.
In 1974 while preparing to enter the Cyril Potter College of Education, I disclosed to my neighbour what she already knew, that things were tight financially, but that I would be definitely going to CPCE. One day she gave me a letter to post to a relative in Trinidad, which I did. I however copied the address knowing that a young woman I had on crush on lived at the same address. I wrote her a letter and posted it the next day.
A few weeks later I stood in disbelief listening to my motherly neighbour accuse me of something I didn’t do – keep the letter she had entrusted me with, in which, she revealed, was a money order. The fact was, according to her, that her relative never received the letter; the implication was that I’d removed the order and somehow used it to my benefit. The motive, also implied, was that I needed the money. To add intrigue to the accusation, she informed me that the letter I had written was received. (With how much incredulity, I’ll never know)
My denial couldn’t appease her anger or her disappointment – that I could repay her kindness with such a dastardly act. She didn’t believe me, since in her eyes everything pointed to my guilt. The upshot was that she stopped speaking to me for several years, even after I helped foil a burglary at her house. About a year before she died, she began to at least acknowledge my existence, in passing, but I felt she never truly believed that I had spoken the truth, and took my assumed guilt with her to the grave. In hindsight I can see why she felt that way, but it did little to assuage my bitterness.
That experience was the smallest of small potatoes when compared to the obvious wrong (to put it mildly) meted out to the child in the other example. Yes, child! It is a case that I’m sure many readers have heard of, but for the apparent injustice of it all, bears repeating.
The place was the segregated town of Alcolu, South Carolina, U.S.A. The year was 1944 and Jim Crow discrimination against Blacks was ‘the law’. Sometime in March of that year, the police came for a Black 14 year-old boy named George Stinney Jr. And so began one of the most disturbing cases of injustice in American history.
Reports reveal that the boy was accused of viciously killing two young White girls, 11 year-old Betty Binnicker and 8 year-old Mary Thames, who were allegedly beaten over the head with a metal spike and dumped in a ditch. With no attorney or his parents present, he was questioned in custody by two White officers and verbally ‘confessed’ to the double murder. George’s father was immediately fired from his sawmill job, and later that night, as a mob came looking for family members, they fled the town.
The Huffington Post last November took a retrospective look at the case, noting that evidence showed George and his sister were the last persons to see the girls alive as they were riding their bicycles in search of wildflowers. It was part of a story heralding the exoneration of George Stinney 70 years after the murders – 70 years too late; but let’s go back to 1944.
After a one-day trial, Stinney was convicted by a jury of 12 White males. No Blacks were allowed in the courtroom. There was ‘no written confession, no bloody clothes, no murder weapon … no transcripts of this proceeding’ and no record of the conviction. According to reports, George’s court-appointed attorney, a tax commissioner running for office, did ‘little to nothing’ to defend him, including not challenging the police officers’ testimony – the only evidence against Stinney. Rape, the prosecution said, was the motive, although medical records showed both girls’ hymens intact. Following a 10-minute deliberation, Stinney was sentenced to death by electric chair. No appeal was filed on his behalf.
Eighty-three days after the murders, during which time none of his family members saw him, Stinney’s 95-pound body was strapped to an electric chair designed for adults, and the first 2400-Volt surge of electricity sent coursing through his body. The adult-size mask fell from his face revealing fearful, tear-stained eyes. He was pronounced dead four minutes later, becoming the youngest person to be executed in America over the last century.
In 2013, lawyers representing Stinney’s family filed a motion for a new trial, after a South Carolina historian and others began researching the case. A year later, S.C. Circuit Judge Carmen Mullen, posthumously vacated the conviction, calling it ‘a great and fundamental injustice’, noting among other things that the all-White jury couldn’t be considered a jury of Stinney’s peers, and that his confession was most likely coerced, ‘due to the power differential between … a 14 year-old Black male … questioned by White uniformed enforcement in a small, segregated mill town …’
So were there ever any George Stinneys in our penal system? I don’t know. I do know that a convicted killer was presidentially pardoned last year, the merits of which are highly debatable. President Granger’s Independence Day pardons are something else though – something that holds the promise of a less punitive and more rehabilitative response to non-violent crime, albeit something that needs careful and continuous monitoring. And you don’t have to be innocent of a gruesome murder, or an alleged theft, to appreciate that.
Please share this to every Guyanese including your house cats.
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