Posted on 06/23/2005 6:04:29 AM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
Former Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen will get at least a three-year prison term -- and could draw up to 60 years -- for the 1964 killing of three civil rights workers, when he faces a sentencing hearing set for Thursday, a Mississippi legal official said.
Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon scheduled a sentencing hearing on Thursday in Neshoba County, Mississippi, for the 80-year-old former Baptist preacher convicted of the notorious crime that galvanized the civil rights movement and inspired the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning."
A multiracial jury convicted Killen on Tuesday on three counts of felony manslaughter, finding that he organized a posse to kidnap, beat and shoot Michael Schwerner, Andrew
Goodman and James Chaney and bulldoze their bodies under an earthen dam.
But the jury cleared him of the more serious charge of murder. Schwerner and Goodman, white New Yorkers, and Chaney, a black Mississippian, were helping blacks register to vote in Neshoba County during the Freedom Summer civil rights campaign when they were killed on June 21, 1964.
Killen faces up to 20 years in prison for each manslaughter conviction. Because he has a prior felony record, for making threatening telephone calls in the 1970s, he is ineligible for probation and must serve at least one year in prison for each count, said Jacob Ray, Special Assistant Attorney General in Mississippi.
"It'll have to be a three-year minimum," Ray told Reuters by telephone. "We will recommend the maximum, 60 years."
Neither side was expected to call witnesses to testify during the sentencing hearing, Ray said. Under Mississippi law, the judge must weigh the nature of the crime against any mitigating factors in determining Killen's sentence.
"They take into consideration the type of crime that was committed, how heinous it was, the facts surrounding the killings themselves. On the mitigating side, they consider age, things like that," Ray said.
Killen breathes with the aid of an oxygen tube and has used a wheel chair since breaking both legs in a tree-cutting accident in March.
He did not testify in his trial in the small Mississippi town of Philadelphia, the latest in a string of prosecutions in recent years from civil rights era killings in the South.
Life without parole.
8 or 80, he did the crime, he can do the time.
I do feel some empathy for him, as he is 80 and wheeling around oxygen, but if he is convicted, there should be punishment. I would think they could think of a more constructive punsihment than jail for him though. Maybe he should have to work at the King Center in Atlanta?
If he had killed your brother,son loved ones
40 years ago would you still say he's too old
to go to jail?
Maybe they should just make him a Senator.
I wonder if he was a democrat when he did the crime.
If convicted he should do the time. If the man was a pedophile and helped sexually molest then murder three 10 year olds back in 1963, would any one want him on the streets?
Why did they take so long to charge him?
Not soon enough. Even if he gets a sentence of 20 years, he has gotten off easy.
Come on? His age doesn't mean anything other than he got away with murder for so long.
He murdered nd in cold blood, no limitations on that crime.
He was cutting down trees at 79? Robust old geezer!
Maybe empathy is not the right word. But I still think he needs to face punishment for his crimes.
No statute of limitations.
Minimum security prison, free meals, free healthcare, friends.....
Hmmmm---not bad if your 80 years old. I bet their are some old timers in the nursing home who love the arrangement.
Ok, I can agree on no jail time - let the family members of the men killed have him - I'm sure they would be as fair as his mob was to the young men.
Kind of a weird thread to see on a site where hundreds of people wanted to toss Mark Felt in jail.
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