Elderly former Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was sentenced today to 60 years in prison for the 1964 killing of three civil rights workers, the notorious crime that galvanized the civil rights movement and inspired the 1988 movie
Mississippi Burning
.
Killen pictured during his trial
Killen wore a yellow prison jumpsuit and showed no emotion as Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon handed down the maximum sentence for the 80-year-old former Baptist preacher, a punishment likely to keep him locked up alone for the rest of his life.
Killen, bald and bespectacled, was wheeled forward to face the judge. He has used a wheel chair since breaking both legs in a tree-cutting accident in March and sometimes breathes with the aid of an oxygen tube.
The judge said he took no pleasure in imposing what amounted to a life term but that the law made no distinction based on the age of the convicted. He sentenced Killen to 20 years for each killing.
“Each life has value,” the judge said. “There were three lives involved in this case and the three lives should absolutely be respected and treated equally.“
A multiracial jury convicted Killen on Tuesday on three counts of felony manslaughter, finding that he organized a posse to kidnap, beat and shoot Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney and bulldoze their bodies under an earthen dam.
But the jury cleared him of the more serious charge of murder. Schwerner and Goodman, white New Yorkers, and Chaney, a black Mississippian, were helping blacks register to vote in Neshoba County during the Freedom Summer civil rights campaign when they were killed on June 21, 1964.
Killen did not testify in his trial in the small Mississippi town of Philadelphia and he declined the judge's invitation to speak at the sentencing hearing.
Killen's attorney, James McIntyre, said he would appeal the verdict with a challenge to the judge's instruction to the jury to consider manslaughter if they could not agree on the murder charges. He expected to file the appeal tomorrow.
Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood said he was not surprised by the sentence.
“I think the judge saw the evidence was there for a murder conviction as well,” he told Court TV, noting evidence that the prosecutors had not been able to bring to the trial.
Hood said that because of parole rules in the state, Killen had received a tougher punishment with a 60-year sentence, eligible for parole only after 20 years, than with a life sentence, which at his age would have made him eligible for parole after 10 years.