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Ex-Klansman Heads to Court for Sentencing

Posted on: Thursday, 23 June 2005, 09:00 CDT

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. - One-time Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen faces up to 60 years in prison for masterminding the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers, an event that galvanized the fight for racial equality in the Deep South.

Killen was scheduled to be back in court Thursday for sentencing, two days after being convicted on three counts of manslaughter 41 years after Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were killed.

Killen, 80, is the only person who has faced state murder charges in the case. He was tried on three murder counts, but at the request of prosecutors, Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon allowed jurors to also consider the lesser charge of manslaughter. He faces up to 20 years for each manslaughter conviction.

In sentencing, Gordon will consider Killen's 1975 conviction for threatening a woman over the telephone, a case that Gordon himself had prosecuted. Killen served five months in prison on the charge.

Gordon, who has a reputation among attorneys as a strict judge, also will consider a presentencing report on Killen's finances, and a health report that the judge requested from Killen's doctors. Killen uses a wheelchair because of a logging accident that broke both of his legs in March, and he had an oxygen tube up his nose during the reading of the verdict on Tuesday.

Gordon will not allow statements from the victims' or the defendant's families, District Attorney Mark Duncan said.

Defense attorney James McIntyre has said he will appeal, arguing that the jury should not have been allowed to consider manslaughter. Gordon will hear a motion for a new trial on Monday.

With a murder charge, prosecutors had to prove intent to kill and a conviction would have carried life in prison. With a manslaughter charge, prosecutors had to prove only that a victim died while another crime was being committed.

Chaney was a black Mississippian and Schwerner and Goodman were white New Yorkers. The three civil-rights volunteers were intercepted by Klansmen in their station wagon on June 21, 1964, and shot to death. After a massive FBI search, the bodies were found 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam.

The slayings helped spur passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the FBI's search for evidence was dramatized in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning."

Killen, a sawmill operator and part-time Baptist minister, has been held in Neshoba County Jail since his conviction.

Source: Associated Press/AP Online

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