Ex-Klansman gets 60 years for 1964 slayings of civil rights workers

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. — One-time Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen was sentenced to the maximum 60 years in prison today for masterminding the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers.

Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon on sentenced Killen to 20-year terms on each of three counts of manslaughter. Gordon said the terms will run consecutively.

Killen, 80, was convicted Tuesday, 41 years after Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were killed.

Killen sat in a wheelchair as the judge announced the sentence. The judge said he took no pleasure in the task and said the law makes no distinction on the defendant's age at the time of sentencing.

"I have taken that into consideration that there are three lives involved in this case and the three lives should absolutely be respected," Gordon said.

Killen 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.

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.

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.

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.

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, also was able to 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.