7/12/2006 3:14:00 PM Killen could go free Friday if
judge approves appeal bond
BY DEBBIE BURT MYERS Managing Editor
Attorneys for Edgar Ray Killen will ask the court Friday to free the former Ku Klux Klan leader who was sentenced to 60 years in prison for his role in the 1964 civil rights murders here, saying he is entitled to bond while his case is on appeal.
Defense attorneys claim Killen’s health has deteriorated since his incarceration in the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility in Rankin County, due in part, to injuries he sustained in a March 2005 logging accident.
The 81-year-old Killen, who was convicted last summer on three counts of manslaughter, has been treated in the hospital at the state penitentiary at Parchman during his imprisonment.
He was earlier hospitalized in the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.
Killen’s attorneys have appealed the case to the state Supreme Court, saying the judge erred in allowing a jury to consider the manslaughter charges.
Killen’s attorneys, Percy Stanfield Jr. and Glen W. Hall, claim the court made several mistakes in allowing jurors in the Neshoba County trial to consider manslaughter charges in the slayings.
Attorney General Jim Hood has said he is confident the conviction will stand.
“We anticipate appeals. The law has been pretty clear on our ability to bring these cases up,” Hood said last month. “I don’t recall any errors that occurred in the trial that are of grave significance.”
Hood said the lesser charges of manslaughter were “key to that conviction.”
Killen, a former preacher and sawmill operator who spent much of his weeklong 2005 trial in a wheelchair and attached to an oxygen tank, was initially released on a $600,000 bond. Friends and relatives used property to secure the bond.
Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon revoked that bond on Sept. 10, saying Killen, had misrepresented medical problems to the court.
Killen broke both legs in a logging accident shortly before his trial and asked to be released from prison while appealing his case because he was in constant pain and confined to the wheelchair.
After testimony from witnesses who said they saw Killen driving around town, Gordon sent Killen back to the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility.
Gordon said he found it difficult to understand how Killen could have limited use of his legs and right arm one week, and be able to drive two weeks later.
Prosecutors initially sought murder convictions in the case, but during the trial they convinced the presiding judge to let the jurors consider the crime of felony manslaughter.
The arguments filed by Killen’s attorneys claim that he was convicted of manslaughter based on the underlying circumstance of kidnapping, an element that had long exceeded its statute of limitations. The statute of limitations for kidnapping in 1964 was two years.
Killen’s “constitutional rights were trampled on beyond recognition and he was convicted of a crime for which he not only was never charged in the indictment, but for which there is no evidence to support,” the attorneys argued in the legal briefs.
The pleadings also claim that “the state laid in wait for their tactical advantage.”
Killen was tried along with several other men in a 1967 federal trial based on violations of the victims’ civil rights, but the jury could not agree on the charges against Killen.
Last year was the first time the state had brought charges in the case.
Killen’s conviction in Neshoba County came exactly 41 years from the day that the three civil rights workers disappeared while investigating the burning of a black church during Freedom Summer in 1964.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Posted: Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Article comment by:
Adrian Cavazos
