Graphic of George Stinney Jr.
The Death Penalty Information Center’s new report on race and the death penalty in South Carolina places the state’s death penalty system in historical context, documenting how racial and state sanctioned violence continue to influence the administration of the death penalty. Examining South Carolina’s History of Racial Violence and Capital Punishment, released May 2026, notes the state’s well-documented use of state-sanctioned violence that has disproportionately affected Black communities for more than 150 years.
Acts of extra-judicial racial terror influenced later, legal systems of punishment, and the practices in western and central regions of South Carolina reflect continuity with the state’s history of racial violence. Counties such as Lexington and Greenville, which accounted for 13 documented racial terror lynchings, have also imposed 28 death sentences on Black defendants since 1975.
South Carolina’s historical use of the death penalty also shows the disproportionate capital sentencing of Black youth. Every juvenile executed during almost 100 years, between 1865 and 1972, was Black. DPI has found that in the modern era (since 1976), five people have been executed in South Carolina for crimes committed before the age of 21 — four of those people (80%) have been Black. One of them was Marion Bowman Jr., the fifth person under age 21 at the time of the crime to be executed in South Carolina since 2005.
South Carolina’s history also reflects broader national patterns of prosecutorial and juror misconduct. The report highlights cases of Black capital defendants who have endured the use of racial epithets by prosecutors in courtrooms. It also documents the systematic exclusion of Black jurors, resulting in death sentences imposed by all-white juries, and cites research demonstrating significant racial disparities in capital jury selection across the state. Research by Ann M. Eisenberg, Associate Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina School of Law, found that between 1997 and 2012, Black prospective jurors were excluded for cause at a rate of 56%; a substantially higher rate than that for white prospective jurors.
In an interview with The Marshall Project, Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy, discussed the role the history of slavery, lynchings, and racial terror in the South played in the racially-motivated killings of nine black people in an historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015.
“If I were the governor of South Carolina, I’d say: ‘We’re going to abolish the death penalty, because we have a history of lynching and terror that has demonized and burdened people of color in this state since we’ve became a state’.”..
Justice 360, a South Carolina based organization working to reform policies and practices in capital and juvenile life without parole proceedings, has developed a proposal for a remedy in response to the historical racial violence in the state. The South Carolina Racial Justice Act (SCRJA) would be “…a modest but important step toward remedying [racial discrimination] issues revealed by empirical data”.
