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Arraignment in killings of civil rights workers
MISSISSIPPI PROSECUTION OF '64 CRIME SPARKS QUESTIONS
By James Dao
New York Times

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. - For nearly all his life, Mark Duncan has lived under the cloud of one of the nation's most infamous unresolved crimes, the brutal killing of three civil rights workers along a muddy road near this town 40 years ago.

But Friday, Duncan, now the district attorney for Neshoba and three other counties, took a long step toward lifting that cloud, charging a 79-year-old preacher, Edgar Ray Killen, with the murders.

Standing before a courtroom packed with reporters, civil rights advocates and Killen's family, Duncan read the charges to the stooped, frail-looking defendant. Dressed in an orange jailhouse jumpsuit, Killen mumbled his answers in a brief interview with the judge -- until he was asked how he would plead.

``Not guilty,'' Killen said in a suddenly forceful voice.

The homicides of the three civil rights workers -- Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney -- and the inability, or unwillingness, of state and local prosecutors to bring charges in the case had left many here wondering whether the town's image would forever be tainted by a single unsolved crime.

Outside court after the arraignment Friday, Duncan, 45, who has lived here his entire life, said healing the town's old wound was not why he pushed for an indictment.

``But,'' he added, ``if that's what it does, I'm all for it.''

Killen, whom officials describe as a former Ku Klux Klan leader, runs a sawmill and owns a 20-acre farm outside town. He was being held without bail at the Neshoba County Jail.

He told Judge Marcus Gordon of Circuit Court that he did not have enough money to afford a lawyer, but the judge refused to appoint one for him, ordering a bond hearing for Wednesday.
Immediately after the arraignment, the courthouse was evacuated because of a bomb threat. As people poured onto the street, Killen's brother knocked down a television cameraman.

``Get all of your shots now,'' the brother, J.D. Killen, said. ``We're going to make sure you're not around for his funeral. My brother's innocent.''

Edgar Killen was among 18 people who were originally charged in 1967 with federal civil rights violations in the deaths. Seven were convicted, but Killen was released after an all-white jury became deadlocked.

And while eight of the original defendants are still alive, Duncan said he did not expect that anyone else would be charged in the case. He suggested that evidence had been presented against others, but that the grand jury had declined to indict anyone other than Killen.
But a representative of the Mississippi attorney general, Jim Hood, said the investigation remained open and that more charges could be brought if new evidence emerged.

The indictment of Killen is just the latest of several cases brought by Southern prosecutors over the past decade involving unresolved killings from the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers, a field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1998, Sam Bowers, the onetime imperial wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was convicted for ordering a 1966 firebombing in Hattiesburg, Miss., that killed Vernon Dahmer, a prominent civil rights leader. And in the spring of 2002, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted of killing four girls in the bombing of a predominantly black church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963.

But it has remained something of a mystery as to why state and county prosecutors have been unable to bring murder charges in the killings of the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia.
The killings had a profound effect on the civil rights movement, generating national sympathy for the cause, prodding President Lyndon B. Johnson to become more aggressive about investigating the Klan and causing some civil rights workers to lose faith in the philosophy of non-violence of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Federal officials gathered enough evidence to prosecute 18 men in 1967 on charges of violating the civil rights of the three slain men. The men who were convicted were sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to 10 years, although none served more than six years. Killen was released after a holdout juror said she could not convict a preacher.

Witnesses at the federal trial testified that Killen had helped recruit and organize the Klan party that authorities say hunted down, beat and shot the three civil rights workers on June 21, 1964, before burying them under a clay berm outside town. Yet prosecutors declined to file state murder charges at the time.

Duncan did little to clear up the mystery Friday, declining to answer questions about what prompted the decision to impanel the grand jury in the case. He said the prosecution would rely in part on evidence from the 1967 federal trial.

But leaders of a group of local business, civic and civil rights leaders who have been pushing for charges in the case over the past year said they believed that Hood, the attorney general, played a major role in pushing for the charges.