Klansman convicted of killing civil rights workers

Edgar Ray Killen as he was being sentenced. Picture / Reuters

PHILADELPHIA, Mississippi - Accused Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of manslaughter on Tuesday in the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers, a case that outraged much of the country and energised the civil rights movement.

Killen, 80, had been portrayed by prosecutors as a Ku Klux Klan leader who recruited a mob to kill Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney exactly 41 years ago, on June 21, 1964. The killings in Neshoba County were dramatised in the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning.

The jury found Killen guilty on three counts of felony manslaughter but not guilty of the more serious charge of murder.

Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon ordered him held at the Neshoba County Sheriff's office pending sentencing on Thursday. Killen, who faces up to 20 years in prison, showed no visible emotion as the verdict was read. He had an oxygen tube in his nose and bailiffs wheeled him away in the wheelchair he has used since breaking both legs in a logging accident in March.

The trial in the small Mississippi town of Philadelphia, the latest in a string of prosecutions in recent years from civil rights era killings in the South, evoked memories of the violent racial conflicts of four decades ago.

Killen, a sawmill operator and Baptist preacher, did not testify. He was accused of murdering Schwerner and Goodman, white New Yorkers, and Chaney, a black Mississippian, who were helping black Americans in Mississippi register to vote during the 1964 Freedom Summer civil rights campaign. If convicted of murder he would have faced life in prison.

In closing arguments, prosecutor Mark Duncan urged jurors to "remove the stain" on Neshoba County. After the verdict, he said it had shown the true character of Neshoba County residents and shown that Mississippi had changed.

"We won't be painted or described or known throughout the world by a Hollywood movie any more," Duncan said.

Defence lawyer James McIntyre told the court Killen "may have been associated with the Klan" but had nothing to do with the killings and was not present when they occurred.

Duncan said that while the verdict was not perfect, "Mr. Killen has been held responsible for these deaths".

The three victims, all in their 20s, were abducted and shot by a group of Klansmen on a remote road outside the eastern Mississippi town on June 21, 1964. Their bodies were found weeks later in an earthen dam.

"I hope that this conviction helps to shed some light on what has happened in this state. I see it as a very important first step," Rita Bender, widow of Michael Schwerner, told reporters.

But she added, "The fact that some members of this jury could have sat through that testimony, indeed could have lived here all these years and could not bring themselves to acknowledge that these were murders ... there are still people among you who choose to look aside, who choose to not see the truth. That means there's a lot more yet to be done."

Killen was among a group of men tried in 1967 for violating the civil rights of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney. Seven co-defendants were convicted by the all-white jury and served up to six years in prison but Killen's trial ended in a hung jury after a lone holdout said she could never convict a preacher.

State prosecutors did not pursue murder charges against any of the original suspects in the 1960s, perhaps swayed by the realisation that no jury in Mississippi had at that time ever convicted whites for killing blacks or civil rights workers.

Killen stayed in the Philadelphia, Mississippi, area after the 1967 trial. He was arrested early this year and charged with murder after Mississippi investigators reopened the case.

This was the latest in a string of such revisited cases. According to civil rights group Southern Poverty Law Center, since 1989, authorities in seven states have re-examined 29 killings from the civil rights era. They have made 27 arrests, which have led to 21 convictions, not counting this case.

- REUTERS