Klansman gets 60 years for manslaughter

United States: The elderly Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was sentenced yesterday to 60 years in prison for orchestrating…

United States: The elderly Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was sentenced yesterday to 60 years in prison for orchestrating the killing of three young civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964.

Killen (80) showed no emotion as he was wheeled out of the courtroom in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in a yellow prison jumpsuit to spend the rest of his life behind bars after the judge delivered the maximum sentence.

Before announcing his decision circuit judge Marcus Gordon said: "You have to remember that I have a job to do, and I have to pass a sentence upon a person who's 80 years old, a person who has suffered a serious injury."

Judge Gordon said he took no pleasure in delivering what amounted to a life term.

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The jury, three of whom were black, convicted Killen on Tuesday on three counts of felony manslaughter, finding that he organised a posse to kidnap, beat and shoot Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, and bulldoze their bodies under an earthen dam.

Their deaths provided the basis for the 1988 film Mississippi Burning, starring Gene Hackman.

Mr Gordon sentenced Killen to consecutive 20-year terms on each of the three counts of manslaughter.

Killen's conviction marks the latest in about two dozen "atonement trials" over the past 15 years, during which investigators have reopened unsolved cases of murders which took place during the 1960s. His lawyer said he would appeal against the verdict, challenging the judge's instruction to the jury to consider manslaughter if they could not agree on murder charges.

Killen, who has used a wheelchair since he broke both his legs in a tree-cutting accident in March, will be held in a cell by himself, separated from other prisoners under an administrative protection status reserved for those at risk of retaliation from other inmates.

"It's kind of a race issue, in that our [ prison] population is 70 per cent black," Mississippi department of corrections commissioner Chris Epps told Reuters.

Killen was convicted on the 41st anniversary of the murders.

The three young male victims had arrived in Neshoba County as part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer to register African-Americans to vote at the height of the civil rights era. Chaney was a black Mississippian; Schwerner and Goodman were white New Yorkers.

On June 21st, they were on their way to investigate the burning of a black church when the local sheriff took them into custody for speeding.

When they were released later that night, a posse of Klansmen followed them, murdered them and buried them in a nearby field.

In 1967, 18 men were prosecuted in a federal court on conspiracy charges relating to the case; seven were convicted but none served longer than six years. Among those who walked free was Killen, the beneficiary of a hung jury. One juror said she could not bring herself to convict a preacher. - (Guardian Service)