Edgar Ray Killen

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See also Mississippi civil rights worker murders

Edgar Ray (Preacher) Killen (born 17 January 1925) is an American former Ku Klux Klan organizer who conspired to kill several civil rights activists in 1964. He was found guilty of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the crime. He has appealed the verdict and is awaiting a hearing by the Mississippi Supreme Court.

Killen was a sawmill operator and part-time Baptist minister and also a kleagle, or klavern recruiter and organizer, for the Neshoba and Lauderdale County chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. During the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, two Jewish New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, and one black Mississippian, James Chaney, 21, were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Killen, along with Cecil Price (deputy sheriff of Neshoba County at the time) gathered the group of men who hunted down and killed the three civil rights workers. The Mississippi Civil Rights Workers Murders galvanized the nation and helped bring about the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The killings are the basis of the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning.

At the time of the killings, the state of Mississippi made little effort to prosecute the perpetrators, but the FBI, under the pro-civil-rights President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, directed a vigorous investigation. Federal prosecutor John Doar, circumventing dismissals by federal judges, opened a grand jury in December 1964. Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall appeared before the Supreme Court to defend the federal government's authority in bringing charges in November 1965. Eighteen men, including Killen, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to violate the victims' civil rights ^[1] in U.S. v. Cecil Price et. al.. The 1967 trial in federal court before an all-white jury ^[2] convicted seven conspirators and acquitted eight others. For three men, including Killen, the trial ended in a hung jury, after the jurors deadlocked 11-1 in favor of conviction, with the lone holdout saying she could never convict a preacher. The prosecution decided not to retry him and he was set free. None of the men found guilty served more than six years.

Journalist Jerry Mitchell, an award winning investigative reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger had written extensively about the case for many years. Mitchell, who had already earned fame for helping secure convictions in several other high profile Civil Rights Era murder cases, including the assassination of Medgar Evers, the Birmingham Church Bombing, and the murder of Vernon Dahmer, developed new evidence, found new witnesses, and pressured the State to take action. Barry Bradford, an Illinois high school teacher, later famous for helping clear the name of Civil Rights martyr Clyde Kennard, and three students, Allison Nichols, Sarah Siegel, and Brittany Saltiel joined Mitchell's efforts. Their documentary, produced for the National History Day contest presented important new evidence and compelling reasons for reopening the case. They also obtained an interview with Edgar Ray Killen which helped convince the State to reinvestigate. Mitchell was able to determine the identity of "Mr. X" the mystery informer who had helped the FBI discover the bodies and smash the conspiracy of the Klan in 1964, in part using evidence developed by Bradford and the students.

In 2004, Killen declared that he would attend a petition-drive in his behalf, scheduled by the Nationalist Movement at the 2004 Mississippi Annual State Fair in Jackson, Mississippi, opposing Communism, integration and non-speedy trials. The Hinds County sheriff, Malcolm MacMillan, conducted a counter-petition, calling for re-opening of the case against Killen. Killen was arrested for three counts of murder on January 6, 2005. However, he was freed on bond shortly thereafter. His case drew comparisons to that of Byron De La Beckwith, who was charged with the killing of Medgar Evers in 1963 and arrested in 1994.

Killen's trial had been scheduled for April 18. It was deferred, however, after the 80-year-old Killen broke both of his legs chopping down lumber in his rural home in Neshoba County. The trial began on June 13, 2005, with Killen attending in a wheelchair. He was found guilty on June 21, 2005 of manslaughter, 41 years to the day after his crime, after a jury of nine whites and three blacks rejected the charges of murder but found him guilty of recruiting the mob that carried out the killings. He was sentenced on June 23, 2005, by Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon to the maximum sentence of 60 years in prison, 20 years for each manslaughter, to be served consecutively. He will be eligible for parole after serving 20 years. At sentencing, Judge Gordon stated that each life lost was valuable and strongly asserted that the law made no distinction of age for the crime and that the maximum sentence should be imposed regardless of Killen's age.

While it is possible that even a ten-year sentence would have been tantamount to a life sentence, it is a foregone conclusion that the entire sentence will not be served.

On August 12, Killen was released from prison on a $600,000 appeal bond. He claimed that he could no longer use his right hand (he had to use his left hand to place his right one on the Bible during his swearing-in) and was permanently confined to his wheelchair. Gordon said he was convinced by testimony that Killen was neither a flight risk nor danger to the community. However, on September 3, the Clarion-Ledger reported that a deputy sheriff saw Killen walking around "with no problem." At a hearing on September 9, several other deputies testified to seeing Killen driving in various locations. One deputy said that Killen shook hands with him using his right hand. Gordon revoked the bond and ordered Killen back to prison, saying that he felt Killen committed a fraud upon the court. [3]

On March 29, 2006, Killen was moved from his prison cell to a Jackson, Mississippi, hospital to treat complications from the severe leg injury he sustained in the logging accident in 2005.

[edit] Notes

↑ The Civil Rights Act of 1968, passed in part due to this case, provided for life imprisonment or the death penalty for deprivations of civil rights (e.g. voter registration) resulting in bodily injury or death. Prior to that the maximum penalty was ten years.
↑ Prior to the 1986 Supreme Court decision Batson v. Kentucky, prosecutors could use the peremptory challenge to arbitrarily exclude individuals from a jury based solely on their race; all-white juries were especially common in the South.