Posted on 08/12/2005 4:42:08 PM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
A Mississippi judge on Friday granted bail to 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen, who was sentenced to 60 years in prison for the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers in a case that inspired the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning."
Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon granted Killen's release on bond of $600,000 pending appeal of his manslaughter conviction, Neshoba County court clerk Patti Duncan Lee said. Killen had not posted bond as of early afternoon.
"The judge granted bond of $600,000, $200,000 for each count," Lee said.
Killen was convicted by a multiracial jury on June 21 on three counts of felony manslaughter for the notorious crime that galvanized the civil rights movement. He was sentenced two days later to 20 years in prison on each count.
After a short trial evoking memories of the brutal racial violence of the era, the jury found Killen organized a posse to kidnap, beat and shoot Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney and bulldoze their bodies under an earthen dam.
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 during the Freedom Summer civil rights campaign when they were killed on June 21, 1964.
If I recall correctly there was no testimony from witnesses. The prosecutor used proxys to read transcripts from the original trial. I thought the accused had the right to face his accuser. This whole thing smells real fishy to me. I think this judge expects the verdict to be overturned on appeal.
He is already out and at home.
I know there are complaints about him getting bond and i don't have any judgement on his guilt or innocence but he isn't really a danger or a flight risk.
Leaving him in jail is like imposing a death sentence minus a trial.
He had that opportunity at his first trial. This was a retrial.
That's the sentence this vicious Klan animal should have received in the first place many years ago.
Some 'justice' - nothing has really changed 'down there'.
Trial retrial you have the same right every time you are tried.
Yes, but so were the murders.
I heard on TV today, that there may be two reasons that the judge may have allowed Killen out...first, Killen may have strong grounds for an appeal, ,and secondly, supposedly Killen is in really ill health and not really expected to live much longer...so maybe the judge was taking pity, and allowing this guy to die at home in his own bed, with his family around...dont know how true this may be, just conjecture, I suppose...
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