His crime repulsed the nation and stands as one of the most heinous of the civil rights era.
In 1964, Ku Klux Klansman Reverend Edgar Ray Killen orchestrated the murders of three young civil rights workers who were helping blacks register to vote in Mississippi's Neshoba County. Killen rounded up a posse of haters to kidnap, beat and shoot the men. He boasted of the killings.
Forty-one years later, on Tuesday, a jury of nine whites and three blacks convicted him of manslaughter. On Thursday, a judge sentenced him to the maximum term of 60 years in prison. Killen, now 80, will likely die there. "The law," said Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon, "does not recognize a distinction of age."
Nor should the passage of time diminish the need for justice. Killen was tried in 1967 along with 17 other Klansmen on federal civil rights charges, but the lone holdout for acquittal said she could not convict Killen because he was a preacher. So this unrepentant racist was able to enjoy decades of freedom and life that he snuffed out for his victims. He has never expressed remorse and deserves no sympathy because of his age. Now he'll have 23 hours a day in isolation, for the rest of his life, to ponder his crimes.
A most just and fair virdict, worth every cent it will cost to inforce!
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