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Jolena
06-21-2005, 03:26 PM
http://www.comcast.net/news/index.jsp?cat=GENERAL&fn=/2005/06/21/161044.html

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. - An 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman was convicted of manslaughter Tuesday in the slayings of three civil rights workers exactly 41 years ago in a notorious case that inspired the movie "Mississippi Burning."

The jury of nine whites and three blacks reached the verdict on their second day of deliberations, rejecting murder charges against Edgar Ray Killen but also turning aside defense claims that he wasn't involved at all.

Killen showed no emotion as the verdict was read. He was comforted by his wife as he sat in his wheelchair, wearing an oxygen tube. Heavily armed police formed a barrier outside a side door to the courthouse and jurors were loaded into two waiting vans and driven away.

Civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were ambushed on June 21, 1964. Their bodies were found 44 days later buried in an earthen dam. They had been beaten and shot.

Cheers could be heard outside the two-story, red brick courthouse after the verdict was announced. Passers-by patted Chaney's brother, Ben, on the back and one woman slowed her vehicle and yelled, "Hey, Mr. Chaney, all right!"

Later, Ben Chaney thanked the prosecutors but said that for the community, "I really feel that there is more to be done." He said there were still no black businesses downtown.

Schwerner's widow, Rita Schwerner Bender, praised the verdict, calling it "a day of great importance to all of us." But she said others also should be held responsible for the slayings.

"Preacher Killen didn't act in a vacuum," Bender said. "The state of Mississippi was complicit in these crimes and all the crimes that occurred, and that has to be opened up."

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.

Killen's lawyers conceded he was in the Klan but said that did not make him guilty. They pointed out that prosecutors offered no witnesses or evidence that put Killen at the scene of the crime. Killen did not take the stand, but has long claimed that he was at a wake at a funeral home when the victims were killed.

While Killen was indicted on murder charges, which could carry a life sentence, prosecutors asked the judge to allow the jury to consider the lesser charge of manslaughter, which has a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Attorney General Jim Hood said earlier that with a murder charge, prosecutors had to prove intent to kill. With a manslaughter charge, he said, prosecutors had to prove only that a victim died while another crime was being committed.

Killen was only person ever brought up on murder charges in the case by the state of Mississippi.

Killen, a part-time preacher and sawmill operator, was tried in 1967 on federal charges of violating the victims' civil rights. But the all-white jury deadlocked, with one juror saying she could not convict a preacher. Seven others were convicted, but none served more than six years.

The trial moved along swiftly, with testimony over only four days. Many of the witnesses from the 1967 trial now dead; this time, their testimony was read aloud to the jury from the transcripts.

Chaney, a black Mississippian, and Goodman and Schwerner, white New Yorkers, were in Neshoba County to look into the torching of a black church and help register black voters during what was called Freedom Summer.

The three were stopped for speeding on the night of the attack, jailed briefly, and then released, after which they were followed out of town by a gang of Klansmen and intercepted.

Witnesses - primarily Klansmen - testified that Killen was a local Klan organizer who led meetings where members discussed the "elimination" of Schwerner, whom they called "Goatee" because of his beard.

Witnesses said on the day of the slayings, Killen drove about 35 miles to Meridian and rounded up carloads of Klansmen to intercept the three men in their station wagon. According to testimony, Killen told some Klansmen to get plastic gloves and helped arrange for a bulldozer to bury the bodies.

Killen's case marked the latest attempt in the Deep South to deal with unfinished business from the civil rights era.

In 1994, Mississippi won the conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 sniper killing of state NAACP leader Medgar Evers.

In Alabama, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted in 2002 of killing four black girls in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963 - the deadliest attack of the civil rights era. In 2001, Thomas Blanton was convicted in the bombing.

State prosecutors also have reopened an investigation into the 1955 slaying of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta. Till was kidnapped from his uncle's home after being accused of whistling at a white woman. Three days later, the 14-year-old's mutilated body was found in a river. Earlier this month, his remains were exhumed and autopsied.

In the case against Killen, prosecutors told jurors that a conviction was crucial in showing the world that times have changed in Mississippi.

"Because the guilt of Edgar Ray Killen is so clear, there is only one question left," prosecutor Mark Duncan said. "Is a Neshoba County jury going to tell the rest of the world that we are not going to let Edgar Ray Killen get away with murder any more? Not one day more."

Defense attorney James McIntyre urged the jury to "vote your conscience" and acquit Killen. "There is a reasonable doubt," the lawyer said.

The bald, gray-haired Killen was brought into court each day in a wheelchair - the result of a logging accident in which he broke his legs. Killen had to be taken from the courthouse in a stretcher last week to be treated for high blood pressure - the same day that Schwerner's widow took the stand.

Bender took a riveted courtroom back in time to 1964, when she and her husband stayed in Mississippi with black families but had to constantly move around because of threats against their lives.

She also recalled the day when she was told that authorities had found the burned-out shell of her husband's blue station wagon.

"I think it really hit me for the first time that they were dead, that there was really no realistic possibility that they were alive," Bender said, occasionally looking as though she was fighting back tears. A few in the courtroom wiped away tears during the testimony.



Now I'm all for people paying for their crimes but DAYUM, this guy was 80 freaking years old. Going for a life sentance is just a waste of time in my opinion since he's not going to live much longer anyhow.

[Edited on 6-21-2005 by Jolena]

Apotheosis
06-21-2005, 03:28 PM
Originally posted by Jolena
Now I'm all for people paying for their crimes but DAYUM, this guy was 80 freaking years old. Going for a life sentance is just a waste of time in my opinion since he's not going to live much longer anyhow.

It's more symbolic then anything else. It's the same thing that happens when old war criminals from WWII are found to be living in the US.

How can we really punish them after their deaths?

The answer: Disgrace them, and put them in the history books as the bad guys.

Anebriated
06-21-2005, 03:30 PM
for the record thats in 1964 not 1964 killings. I definately read that as he killed 1964 people at first...

[Edited on 6-21-2005 by Elrodin]

Jolena
06-21-2005, 03:30 PM
Um..yeah, I didn't mean to imply he killed 1964 folks. :lol:

Anebriated
06-21-2005, 03:32 PM
My jaw dropped when I read it at first.

Jolena
06-21-2005, 03:33 PM
Okay so yeah, I'm a dumbass and I changed it. :cry:

Wezas
06-21-2005, 03:34 PM
But the all-white jury deadlocked, with one juror saying she could not convict a preacher.

That person sickens me and should not have been in the jury in the first place. Bad jury selection by the prosecution.


A jury found former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen guilty of all three counts of manslaughter Tuesday. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years per count, and a minimum of one year per count.

I don't care if he's in his 80's. I hope it's closer to 60 years than 3.

Jolena
06-21-2005, 03:37 PM
Originally posted by Wezas
[quote]But the all-white jury deadlocked, with one juror saying she could not convict a preacher.

That person sickens me and should not have been in the jury in the first place. Bad jury selection by the prosecution./quote]

That jury was also picked 41 years ago. That in itself explains a lot, doncha think?

Wezas
06-21-2005, 03:42 PM
Originally posted by Jolena
That jury was also picked 41 years ago. That in itself explains a lot, doncha think?

It's sad, but that coupled with the area they were in does explain alot of it.

What a turn-around. Now we focus on preachers/priests.

Leetahkin
06-23-2005, 01:33 PM
Ba-bump

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,160445,00.html

Killen Sentenced to 60 Years for 1964 Slayings

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. — Saying "each life has value," a judge on Thursday sentenced former Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen (search) to the maximum 60 years in prison for masterminding the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers.

The frail, 80-year-old Killen, sitting in a wheelchair and dressed in a yellow jail jumpsuit, sat impassively and stared straight ahead as Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon (search) sentenced him to 20-year terms on each of three counts of manslaughter. Gordon said the terms will run consecutively.

The sentence brings to a close one of the most horrifying chapters in the movement for racial equality in the United States.

The three men Killen was convicted of killing — black Mississippian James Chaney (search) and white New Yorkers Michael Schwerner (search) and Andrew Goodman (search) — were beaten and shot by a gang of Klansmen, their bodies buried in an earthen dam. The killings shocked the nation and helped spur passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964; the FBI's search for evidence in the case was dramatized in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning."

Killen was convicted Tuesday, 41 years to the day after the three men were killed.

On Thursday, Killen was brought before Gordon in the wheelchair he has occupied since a March logging accident that broke both his legs. Absent was the oxygen tube he had up his nose during the reading of the verdict.

The judge said the law makes no distinction based on the defendant's age at the time of sentencing.

"I have to pass on a sentence to a person who is 80 years old. A person who has suffered a serious injury," Gordon said. "There are those of you in the courtroom that would say a sentence of 10 years would be a life sentence."

He added: "I heard the evidence of this case ... Each life has value. Each life is equally as valuable as the other life and I have taken that into consideration. The three lives should absolutely be respected and treated equally."

After the sentence was handed down, Killen's wife, Betty Jo, pushed past security to give her husband three kisses on the cheek before he was wheeled from the courtroom. Killen was whisked away from the courthouse in a sheriff's vehicle.

Defense attorney James McIntyre said Killen's last words as he was wheeled away were: "I'll see you."

Killen will be taken to state prison, where his status will evaluated and he will be held in solitary confinement, Attorney General Jim Hood said. Hood said Killen has expressed no remorse.

"I know at some point he'll get to that realization, you'd don't get to heaven unless you admit what you've done and ask for forgiveness," Hood said.


.... a little bit more on the link, but not much. Think it just recaps everything again.

Omens
06-23-2005, 02:00 PM
What ever happend to the 30 year time limit on a conviction. I remember something about that when I was a kid. That doesnt fly anymore ?

I mean I dont think the guy should have got off or antyhing. Just wondering that fact.

Warriorbird
06-23-2005, 02:02 PM
No statute of limitations on certain types of cases.

[Edited on 6-23-2005 by Warriorbird]

Jolena
06-23-2005, 02:04 PM
I've never heard of a 30 year time limit on convictions to be honest.

As to Killen, it's sad that he's being sent to jail at 80 years old however it is a statement to the general public and to the Klan that even if you are a decrepit old slip of a man and it has been 41 years since you masterminded the murder of 3 folks, you don't get away with it. heh.

Wonder if the bill that the prison will pay for his medical care will be worth his sentancing.

Omens
06-23-2005, 02:24 PM
Originally posted by Warriorbird
No statue of limitations on certain types of cases.

Ok, yeah that's what I was getin at.

Thanks WB.

Skirmisher
06-23-2005, 02:33 PM
I see nothing sad at all that he is going to jail.

The bastard got to enjoy the majority of his life a free man.

His victims are still dead.

If he doesn't somehow repent then my hope is for him to die in there a broken bitter man.

Sylph
06-23-2005, 03:13 PM
I was thinking... He musta been VERY busy!!

DeV
06-23-2005, 03:19 PM
Originally posted by Skirmisher
I see nothing sad at all that he is going to jail.

The bastard got to enjoy the majority of his life a free man.
Yep...

There is no statute of limitations with regard to murder.

Edaarin
06-23-2005, 08:23 PM
Holy shit that dude looks like the Six Flags dancer guy.

Do do do do do doo doo...do do do do do doo doo...do do do do do do do.