Killen Guilty of Manslaughter in '64 Civil Rights Killings
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
PHILADELPHIA, Miss. -- An 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman was convicted of manslaughter Tuesday in the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers -- exactly 41 years after they disappeared.
The jury of nine whites and three blacks reached the verdict on their second day of deliberations, rejecting murder charges against Edgar Ray Killen.
Killen showed no emotion as the verdict was read. He was comforted by his wife as he said in his wheelchair. He was wearing an oxygen tube. Heavily armed police a barrier outside a side door to the courthouse and jurors were loaded into two waiting vans and driven away.
The verdict was 41 years to the date after James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were ambushed, beaten, and shot.
Prosecutors had asked the jury to send a message to the rest of the world that Mississippi has changed and is committed to bringing to justice those who killed to preserve segregation in the 1960s. They said the evidence was clear that Killen organized the attack on the three victims.
Earlier:
By SHADI RAHIMI
A Mississippi jury resumed deliberations today in the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, on the 41st anniversary of the three murders that Mr. Killen, a former Ku Klux Klansman, is accused of orchestrating.
The jury was split 6-6 late Monday after nearly three hours of deliberating the fate of Mr. Killen, an ailing sawmill operator who is charged with masterminding the killings of three voter registration workers in 1964. Jurors were sent back to a hotel and sequestered for the night after the judge, Marcus Gordon, checked their progress.The defense argued Monday in closing statements that the 41-year-old case should never have been brought against Mr. Killen, who is now 80. A defense lawyer, James McIntyre, conceded that Mr. Killen was once a Klan member but argued, "He's not charged with being a member of the Klan, he's charged with murder."
"If you vote your conscience you are voting not guilty," Mr. McIntyre told the jurors. "There is a reasonable doubt."
In his rebuttal, the district attorney, Mark Duncan, said that the evidence that Mr. Killen was culpable in the killings is "absolutely overwhelming."
"There is only one question left," Mr. Duncan said. "Is a Neshoba County jury going to tell the rest of the world that we're not going to let Edgar Ray Killen get away with murder? Not one day more."
Mr. Killen, the first to face state murder charges in the case, could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted of murder. He did not testify at the trial, which began last Wednesday, and looked down or straight ahead as he listened to the lawyers deliver their closing statements to the jury.
On the night they disappeared, the three victims, all in their 20's, had been helping to register black voters during the "Freedom Summer" of 1964 and were investigating a church in Philadelphia, Miss., that had been burned by the Ku Klux Klan.
The victims, James Earl Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, were initially taken into custody on speeding charges. Upon their release from jail, their car was pursued by Klansmen. They were shot dead and later found buried in an earthen dam. Their 44-day disappearance thrust the Jim Crow code of segregation in the South into the national spotlight and helped to spearhead passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Of the 18 men tried a year later on federal civil rights charges, 7 were convicted by the all-white jury. Mr. Killen was freed when the jury deadlocked 11 to 1 in favor of conviction, after a holdout juror said she could not convict a preacher.
Eight of the defendants are still alive. The men who were convicted were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 3 years to 10 years, although none served more than 6 years. The case gained renewed international attention when it was dramatized in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning."
Mr. Killen, who is being tried by the State of Mississippi on three counts of murder, has been free on bail and uses a wheelchair because of arthritis that worsened after he broke his legs in a tree-cutting accident in March.
Prosecutors sought to convince the jurors - nine whites and three blacks - that although Mr. Killen was not present during the killings, he had organized groups of men and planned what they would do, including, according to testimony, telling the men where to go and instructing someone to buy gloves for the men to wear during the crime.
Jim Hood, the state attorney general who is helping Mr. Duncan prosecute the case, said during closing arguments, "When this so-called preacher made instructions and gave the word, people believed in him."
The final witness for the defense was a former mayor of the rural town of Philadelphia, Harlan Majure, who testified before a packed courtroom today that the Ku Klux Klan was a "peaceful organization that "did a lot of good up here." |
