More than 70 years after South Carolina sent a 14-year-old black boy to the electric chair in the killings of two white girls in a segregated mill town, a judge threw out the conviction, saying the State committed a great injustice.

George Stinney was arrested, convicted of murder in a one-day trial and executed in 1944 all in the span of about three months and without an appeal.

The speed in which the State meted out justice against the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century was shocking and extremely unfair, Circuit Judge Carmen Mullen wrote in her ruling on Wednesday.

During a two-day hearing in January, Judge Mullen heard from Stinney’s surviving brother and sisters, someone involved in the search and experts who questioned the autopsy findings and Stinney’s confession. Most of the evidence from the original trial was gone and almost all the witnesses were dead.

The case has long cited as an example of how a black person could be railroaded by a justice system during the era of Jim Crow segregation laws where the investigators, prosecutors and juries were all white.