Ex-Klansman Gets 60 Years for 1964 Murders

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. – Saying “each life has value,” a judge on Thursday sentenced former Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen to the maximum 60 years in prison for masterminding the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers.

The frail, 80-year-old Killen, sitting in a wheelchair and dressed in a yellow jail jumpsuit, sat impassively and stared straight ahead as Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon sentenced him to 20-year terms on each of three counts of manslaughter. Gordon said the terms will run consecutively.

The sentence brings to a close one of the most horrifying chapters in the movement for racial equality in the United States.

The three men Killen was convicted of killing – black Mississippian James Chaney and white New Yorkers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman – were beaten and shot by a gang of Klansmen, their bodies buried in an earthen dam. The killings shocked the nation and helped spur passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964; the FBI’s search for evidence in the case was dramatized in the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.”

Killen was convicted Tuesday, 41 years to the day after the three men were killed.

On Thursday, Killen was brought before Gordon in the wheelchair he has occupied since a March logging accident that broke both his legs. Absent was the oxygen tube he had up his nose during the reading of the verdict.

The judge said the law makes no distinction based on the defendant’s age at the time of sentencing.

“I have to pass on a sentence to a person who is 80 years old. A person who has suffered a serious injury,” Gordon said. “There are those of you in the courtroom that would say a sentence of 10 years would be a life sentence.”

He added: “I heard the evidence of this case … Each life has value. Each life is equally as valuable as the other life and I have taken that into consideration. The three lives should absolutely be respected and treated equally.”

After the sentence was handed down, Killen’s wife, Betty Jo, pushed past security to give her husband three kisses on the cheek before her husband was wheeled from the courtroom. Killen was whisked away from the courthouse in a sheriff’s vehicle.

Defense attorney James McIntyre said Killen’s last words as he was wheeled away were: “I’ll see you.”

Killen will be taken to state prison, where his status will evaluated and he will be held in solitary confinement, Attorney General Jim Hood said. Hood said Killen has expressed no remorse.

“I know at some point he’ll get to that realization, you’d don’t get to heaven unless you admit what you’ve done and ask for forgiveness,” Hood said.

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

He 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, Gordon allowed jurors to also consider the lesser charge of manslaughter.

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.

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.

McIntyre said he had expected the maximum sentence because of the circumstances of the case.

“Judge Marcus Gordon is an excellent judge. I’ve never questioned his intellectual honesty or integrity,” he said.

Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, all civil rights volunteers, were intercepted by Klansmen in their station wagon on June 21, 1964, and shot to death. Killen was tried in 1967 on federal charges of violating the victims’ civil rights. But the all-white jury deadlocked, with one juror saying she could not convict a preacher.

Seven others were convicted, but none served more than six years.

Killen had been convicted in 1975 of 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, was able to consider a presentencing report on Killen’s finances and a health report he requested from Killen’s doctors.