Edgar Ray Killen

Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen (born 17 January 1925) is an American former Ku Klux Klan organizer who conspired to kill three civil rights activists (Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner) in 1964.

He was found guilty of three counts of manslaughter on June 21 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the crime. He appealed the verdict, but his punishment of 3 times 20 years in prison was upheld on January 12 2007 by the Mississippi Supreme Court.

Biography

Killen was a sawmill operator and part-time Baptist minister and also a kleagle, or klavern recruiter and organizer, for the Neshoba and Lauderdale County chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.

Murders

During the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, two Jewish New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, and one black Mississippian, James Chaney, 21, were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The Ku Klux Klan organizer Edgar Ray Killen, along with Cecil Price (then deputy sheriff of Neshoba County), had gathered a group of men who hunted down and killed the three civil rights workers. The Mississippi Civil Rights Workers Murders galvanized the nation and helped bring about the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The killings are the basis of the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning".

At the time of the killings, the state of Mississippi made little effort to prosecute the perpetrators. The FBI, under the pro-civil-rights President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, directed a vigorous investigation. Federal prosecutor John Doar, circumventing dismissals by federal judges, opened a grand jury in December 1964. Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall appeared before the Supreme Court to defend the federal government's authority in bringing charges in November 1965. Eighteen men, including Killen, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to violate the victims' civil rights [The Civil Rights Act of 1968, passed in part due to this case, provided for life imprisonment or the death penalty for deprivations of civil rights resulting in bodily injury or death. Prior to that the maximum penalty was ten years.] in "U.S. v. Cecil Price et. al.".

The 1967 trial in federal court before an all-white jury [Prior to the 1986 Supreme Court decision "Batson v. Kentucky", prosecutors could use the peremptory challenge to arbitrarily exclude individuals from a jury based solely on their race; all-white juries were especially common in the South.] convicted seven conspirators and acquitted eight others. For three men, including Killen, the trial ended in a hung jury, after the jurors deadlocked 11-1 in favor of conviction. The lone holdout saying she could never convict a preacher. The prosecution decided not to retry Killen and he was set free. None of the men found guilty served more than six years.

Journalist Jerry Mitchell, an award-winning investigative reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, had written extensively about the case for many years. Mitchell had already earned fame for helping secure convictions in several other high profile Civil Rights Era murder cases, including the assassination of Medgar Evers, the Birmingham Church Bombing, and the murder of Vernon Dahmer. For the murders of the civil rights workers, Mitchell developed new evidence, found new witnesses, and pressured the State to take action. Working with Mitchell were high school teacher Barry Bradford and a team of three students from Illinois. [The full story can be found at http://www.miburn.org]

They got Killen to do his only taped interview (to that point) talking about the crime. That tape showed Killen clinging to his segregationist views and clearly competent and aware. The students uncovered potential new witnesses, created a web site, lobbied Congress, and focused national media attention on the reopening of the case. Ben Chaney called them "Superhero Girls".

Re-emergence of the case

In 2004, Killen declared that he would attend a petition-drive in his behalf, scheduled by the Nationalist Movement at the 2004 Mississippi Annual State Fair in Jackson, Mississippi. It opposed Communism, integration and non-speedy trials. The Hinds County sheriff, Malcolm MacMillan, conducted a counter-petition, calling for re-opening of the case against Killen. Killen was arrested for three counts of murder on January 6 2005. He was freed on bond shortly thereafter. His case drew comparisons to that of Byron De La Beckwith, who was charged with the killing of Medgar Evers in 1963 and arrested in 1994.

Killen's trial was scheduled for April 18 2005. It was deferred, however, after the 80-year-old Killen broke both of his legs chopping down lumber in his rural home in Neshoba County. The trial began on June 13 2005, with Killen attending in a wheelchair. He was found guilty on June 21 2005 of manslaughter, 41 years to the day after his crime. The jury of nine whites and three blacks rejected the charges of murder but found him guilty of recruiting the mob that carried out the killings. He was sentenced on June 23 2005 by Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon to the maximum sentence of 60 years in prison, 20 years for each manslaughter, to be served consecutively. He will be eligible for parole after serving at least 20 years, although it is almost impossible he will live this long given his age and health. At the sentencing, Judge Gordon stated that each life lost was valuable and strongly asserted that the law made no distinction of age for the crime and that the maximum sentence should be imposed regardless of Killen's age.

On August 12, Killen was released from prison on a $600,000 appeal bond. He claimed that he could no longer use his right hand (he had to use his left hand to place his right one on the Bible during his swearing-in) and was permanently confined to his wheelchair. Gordon said he was convinced by testimony that Killen was neither a flight risk nor danger to the community. However, on September 3, the "Clarion-Ledger" reported that a deputy sheriff saw Killen walking around "with no problem".

At a hearing on September 9, several other deputies testified to seeing Killen driving in various locations. One deputy said that Killen shook hands with him using his right hand. Gordon revoked the bond and ordered Killen back to prison, saying that he believed Killen committed a fraud upon the court. [ [http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050910/NEWS010702/509100361/1002/NEWS01 Clarion Ledger report] ] On March 29, 2006, Killen was moved from his prison cell to a Jackson, Mississippi hospital to treat complications from the severe leg injury he sustained in a logging accident in 2005.

ee also

*Mississippi civil rights workers murders

Notes and references

External links

* [http://www.mississippiburning.org/ Valuable site explaining how the case was reopened]
* [http://www.courttv.com/trials/killen/ Court TV coverage of the Edgar Ray Killen murder trial]
* [http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/price&bowers/Killen.htm Edgar Ray Killen ]
* [http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/neshoba.php Jackson (Miss.) Free Press Killen Blog]
* [http://www.nationalist.org/docs/ideology/2004/070401.html Killen interviewed by Nationalist Movement leader Richard Barrett] – Barrett is a Mississippi-based white nationalist, a vocal supporter of Killen, and believes that Schwerner and Goodman were communist operatives
* [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4712785 National Public Radio trial-reaction roundtable] (audio)
* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4116870.stm BBC Report on the conviction]
* [http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2007/01/jerry_mitchell.html Profile of Jerry Mitchell] , the journalist whose work led to Killen's arrest ("Mother Jones" magazine)
* [http://www.mdoc.state.ms.us/InmateDetails.asp?PassedId=112906 Killen's Mississippi Department of Corrections record]