Accused Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of manslaughter today in the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers, a case that outraged much of the country and energized 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 dramatized in the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.“
The jury, which deliberated for about two hours yesterday evening and this morning, found Killen guilty on three counts of felony manslaughter but not guilty of the more serious charge of murder.
Killen, who faces up to 20 years in prison, had a tube in his nose, presumably to supply oxygen, as the verdict was read. He showed no visible emotion.
Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon ordered Killen held in custody of Neshoba County Sheriff's office, and then bailiffs wheeled him out of the courtroom in his wheel chair. Killen has used a wheel chair since breaking both legs in a logging accident.
The trial in the Mississippi town of Philadelphia 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.
Defense lawyer James McIntyre said Killen “may have been associated with the Klan” but had nothing to do with the killings and was not present at the scene of the shootings.
The three men, 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.
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.
Killen stayed in the Philadelphia, Mississippi, area after the 1967 trial, logging and preaching in local churches. He was arrested early this year and charged with the murders after Mississippi investigators reopened the case.