Justice That Comes Too Late:
What Individual Stories Can Teach Us About the (In)Justice System
Tommy Lee Walker: Innocence After Death
In January 2026, Dallas County officials officially declared Tommy Lee Walker (a nineteen-year-old who was executed in Texas in 1956) innocent. How was an innocent young man found guilty in the first place? False evidence, coercive interrogation, and racism. Because Walker was a Black teenager in the Jim Crow South—a place that routinely demonized Black men as hypersexual beings who assaulted white women. Indeed, an all-white jury convicted him of rape and murder. As a result, Walker was sentenced to the electric chair for a crime he didn’t commit. So, while it’s important that Dallas County finally acknowledged his wrongful conviction, it came seventy years too late.
In an age when more and more people are becoming interested in creating a more just justice system, Walker’s case forces us to ask a really hard question: What does it mean when justice comes too late?
George Stinney Jr. and the Speed of Injustice
One reason this is an important question to ask is because Tommy Lee Walker was not the first Black youth wrongfully convicted and executed. In 1944, South Carolina executed a fourteen-year-old boy named George Stinney, Jr. He was arrested without his parents present, interrogated alone, rushed to trial, represented by an attorney who, quite frankly, did not do their job, and ultimately convicted by an all-white jury that barely spent any time deliberating. Seventy years later, a judge vacated his conviction, ruling that he had been denied basic due process. The court rightly called it a fundamental injustice.
Stories like Walker’s and Stinney’s are often mischaracterized as tragic anomalies or singular miscarriages of justice from a bygone era. But a careful examination of America’s justice system reveals a pattern that both predated their trials and continues to distort today’s justice system.
Lena Baker and the Criminalization of Survival
In fact, this pattern becomes even clearer when we examine how the history of Black women’s encounters with the justice system reveals how injustice could shape-shift. For example, in 1945, Lena Baker became the only woman in Georgia to be executed by the electric chair. Baker, a poor Black domestic worker, claimed she killed a white man in self-defense. According to her testimony, he imprisoned and assaulted her.
Her trial lasted less than a day. As with Walker and Stinney, Baker was found guilty by an all-white jury that rejected her claim of self-defense. She was sentenced to death. Sixty years later, Georgia acknowledged that the state committed an error in denying her clemency and granted her a posthumous pardon.
Baker’s case shows how the criminal justice system criminalized Black women’s survival. While Walker and Stinney were portrayed as threats to white safety, Baker was punished for defending her own life. Just like in every other part of their lives, when Black women became involved with the criminal justice system, the courtroom turned into a space where their gender and race intersected. This intersection meant that, unlike white women, their virtue was not protected. And their efforts to defend themselves were punished.
Yet, even this framework does not fully capture the landscape of danger Black women faced.
Consider becoming a paid subscriber to continue reading about how much of the racial violence faced by Black women never reached a courtroom—and how these cases expose the deeper architecture of injustice that still shapes American law today.
