Justice Delayed 41 years...
PHILADELPHIA, Mississippi (CNN) -- Forty-one years to the day three civil rights workers were ambushed and killed by a Ku Klux Klan mob, a jury found former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen guilty of all three counts of manslaughter Tuesday.
The "Freedom Summer" killings of James Chaney, 21, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, galvanized the civil rights movement.
The jury of nine whites and three blacks reached the decision after several hours of deliberations.
In his closing argument Monday, Neshoba County District Attorney Mark Duncan implored the 12 jurors to "hold the defendant responsible for what he did."
"What you do today when you go into that jury room is going to echo throughout the history of Neshoba County from now on," Duncan said. "You can either change the history that Edgar Ray Killen and the Klan wrote for us, or you can confirm it."
"Find him guilty of murder," Duncan said. "That's the verdict that the state of Mississippi asks you to return."
He told the jury to think of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner -- three young men who had volunteered to help register blacks to vote in the summer of 1964, an act "so despised it cost them their lives."
Chaney was a black man from Mississippi.
Goodman and Schwerner were white New Yorkers who came to the South with hundreds of other civil rights activists.
"Those three boys and their families were robbed of all the things that Edgar Ray Killen has been able to enjoy for the last 41 years. And the cause of it, the main instigator of it was Edgar Ray Killen and no one else," the district attorney said.
"He was the man who led these murders. He is the man who set the plan in motion. He is the man who recruited the people to carry out the plan. He is the man who directed those men into what to do."
Now 80, the balding, bespectacled Killen -- a former preacher -- appeared to be sleeping during much of the closing remarks.
The old bastard will have plenty of time to sleep now...
Posted by David A at June 21, 2005 12:14 PM
Filed Under | 352 Words
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.grupo-utopia.com/blog/mt/mt-tb.cgi/292
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in,
.
Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)
