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“I think it’s a longshot, but I admire the lawyer for trying it,” Gaines said, adding that he’s not aware of any other executed inmates in the state being granted a new trial posthumously.

White people stayed on their side of Alcolu and we knew our place

The request for a new trial is largely symbolic, but Stinney’s supporters say they would prefer exoneration to a pardon.

Stinney’s case intersects some long-running disputes in the American legal system – the death penalty and race. At 14, he’s the youngest person executed in the United States in past 100 years. He was electrocuted just 84 days after the girls were killed in March 1944.

The request for a new trial includes sworn statements from two of Stinney’s siblings who say he was with them the entire day the girls were killed. Notes from Stinney’s confession and most other information deputies and prosecutors used to convict Stinney in a one-day trial have disappeared along with any transcript of the proceedings. Only a few pages of cryptic, hand-written notes remain, according to the motion.

“Why was George Stinney electrocuted? The state can’t produce any paperwork to justify why he was,” said George Frierson, a local school board member who grew up in Stinney’s hometown hearing stories about the case and decided six years ago to start studying it and pushing for exoneration.

The South Carolina Attorney General’s Office will likely argue the other side of the case before the Clarendon County judge. A spokesman said their lawyers had not seen the motion and do not comment on pending cases. A date for a hearing on the matter has not been set.