A reputed member of the Ku Klux Klan now in his 70s has been sentenced to life without parole for the 1966 murder of a black man who was shot in what prosecutors say was a plot to lure the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr to Mississippi to be assassinated.
Mr Ernest Avants, a 72-year-old stroke victim who suffers from congestive heart failure, was convicted in Mississippi in January. Because of his failing health, sentencing took place today at the Fort Worth Medical Centre, Texas.
US District Judge William Barbour said he imposed the maximum penalty because Avants had shown no remorse.
"Times have changed since 1966," Judge Barbour said. "I hope that when Mr Avants's generation has finally died, I hope the feeling of hatred against black people will have died with them."
Prosecutors said Avants and two white companions offered 67-year-old Chester White two dollars and a soft drink to help them with a chore. White, who had no connection to the civil rights movement, was driven to a forest, shot dead and dumped in a river bed.
The case is the latest in a string of civil rights era cases that have been reopened and prosecuted in recent years.
Last year, an Alabama jury convicted an ageing former Klansman of murder for the 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls in Birmingham. In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted over the 1963 death of civil rights activist Medgar Evars in Mississippi.
At his sentencing, Avants had tubes in his nose and a portable oxygen tank beside him. He sat in a reclining, padded chair with rolling wheels, a nurse was by his side. He answered "yes" when the judge asked if he had read the pre-sentencing report, but did not speak during the rest of the hearing.
The defence had asked for the possibility of parole in less than 15 years, saying Avants was in poor health and has a wife and young child.
Avants was acquitted of murder in a 1967 state trial, but federal authorities brought a charge of aiding and abetting murder years later because White was killed on federal property.
AP