Conviction in Chaney, Schwerner, Goodman Killings
excerpts from “Ex-Klansman Gets 60 Years for 1964 Killings,” by Emily Wagster Pettus, AP, for the Washington Post, June 23, 2005
PHILADELPHIA, Miss. — One-time Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen was sentenced to the maximum 60 years in prison Thursday for masterminding the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers. Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon on sentenced Killen to 20-year terms on each of three counts of manslaughter. Gordon said the terms will run consecutively. Killen, 80, was convicted Tuesday, 41 years after Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were killed.
Killen is the only person who has faced state murder charges in the case. He was tried on three murder counts, but at the request of prosecutors, Gordon allowed jurors to also consider the lesser charge of manslaughter.
[But for some of those who had hoped to see Mr. Killen convicted of murder, the manslaughter verdict was a less than total victory. “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, that they were committed with malice, indicates that there are still people unfortunately among you who choose to look aside, who choose to not see the truth,” Ms. Bender, who was married to Mr. Schwerner, said. from nytimes]
Defense attorney James McIntyre has said he will appeal, arguing that the jury should not have been allowed to consider manslaughter. Gordon will hear a motion for a new trial on Monday.
Chaney was a black Mississippian and Schwerner and Goodman were white New Yorkers. The three civil-rights volunteers were intercepted by Klansmen in their station wagon on June 21, 1964, and shot to death. After a massive FBI search, the bodies were found 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam.
The slayings helped spur passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the FBI’s search for evidence was dramatized in the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.”
Killen, a sawmill operator and part-time Baptist minister, 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.