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Ex-KKK member found guilty of manslaughter in '64 civil rights murders
By Bill Nichols and Jerry Mitchell, USA TODAY
PHILADELPHIA, Miss. — A former Ku Klux Klansman was convicted of manslaughter Tuesday in the notorious 1964 murders of three civil rights workers — 41 years to the day after they disappeared.
Ray Killen, 80, faces up to 20 years in prison in the notorious 1964 murders of three civil rights workers.
By Danny Johnston, AP
A jury of nine whites and three blacks rejected murder charges against Edgar Ray Killen on the second day of deliberations. (Related video: More on the verdict)
Killen, 80, showed little emotion as the verdict was read. He was taken into custody.
Killen uses a wheelchair because his legs were broken in a logging accident in March. He wore a nasal oxygen tube throughout the weeklong trial. He faces up to 20 years in prison for each of the three counts. Sentencing is set for Thursday.
The case marked the latest attempt by a Southern state to atone for justice denied during the civil rights era. In 1994, Mississippi convicted Byron de la Beckwith in the 1963 murder of state NAACP leader Medgar Evers. In Alabama, Frank Cherry was convicted in 2002 of killing four black girls in the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church.
Another infamous case, the 1955 slaying of 14-year-old Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta, has been reopened. His remains were exhumed this month and autopsied.
A biracial local coalition pressed last year for justice in the Philadelphia case. Tuesday, they were elated to gain a measure of closure for a crime that was the basis for the 1988 film, Mississippi Burning.
The verdict "signifies this county has dealt with its past and is ready to move on to the future," said Leroy Clemens, the local NAACP president and co-chairman of the Philadelphia Coalition.
The slayings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were one of the most publicized crimes of a bloody era.
They had been registering black voters when they disappeared. Their bodies were found in an earthen dam 44 days later. They had been beaten and shot.
Killen's indictment in January marked the first state murder charges in the case. He and 17 others were tried on federal civil rights charges in 1967. Seven were convicted — none served more than six years — and Killen was freed after a mistrial.
Prosecutors asked Judge Marcus Gordon to let the jury consider a lesser charge of manslaughter. Murder requires proof of intent to kill. Manslaughter requires only proof that a victim died during another crime.
Lawyers for Killen, a sawmill operator and part-time Baptist minister, said they planned an appeal on the basis that the jury should not have been allowed to consider manslaughter charges.
Schwerner's widow, Rita Schwerner Bender, lauded the decision but said the jury's failure to find Killen guilty of murder "indicates that there are still people among you ... who choose not to see the truth."
Former Mississippi secretary of State and Philadelphia native Dick Molpus, who became the first state official to apologize to families of the slain men in 1989, hailed the verdict as a kind of exorcism.
"Should this have been done 40 years ago? Absolutely. Is there more work to be done? Clearly. But this is one significant step toward redemption for Neshoba County and for the state of Mississippi," he said.
Mitchell, a reporter for The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger, was in Philadelphia; Nichols in Washington
SHIT I GUESS OUT JUDICIAL SYSTEM HASN'T COMPLETELY FAILED US YET!!!
