Ex-Klansman guilty in '64 slayings

An 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman was convicted of manslaughter Tuesday in the slayings of three civil rights workers exactly 41 years ago in a notorious case that inspired the movie "Mississippi Burning."

The jury of nine whites and three blacks reached the verdict on their second day of deliberations, rejecting murder charges against Edgar Ray Killen but also turning aside defense claims that he wasn't involved at all.

"Even though it's not murder, manslaughter is a serious felony crime," said CBS News Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen. "It almost certainly will involve significant prison time which means the conviction is tantamount to a death sentence for the frail Killen."

Killen showed no emotion as the verdicts were read. He was comforted by his wife as he sat in his wheelchair, wearing an oxygen tube. He was immediately taken into custody by the sheriff, and Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon said he would set a sentencing date later in the day.

CBS News Correspondent Cami McCormick reports that the judge told the jury he knew it had been a trying several days for them. After the verdicts were announced, the jury was loaded into two vans and driven away from the courthouse.

Civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were ambushed on June 21, 1964. Their bodies were found 44 days later buried in an earthen dam. They had been beaten and shot.

Cheers could be heard outside the two-story, red brick courthouse after the verdicts were announced. Passers-by patted Chaney's brother, Ben, on the back and one woman slowed her vehicle and yelled, "Hey, Mr. Chaney, all right!"

Later, Ben Chaney thanked the prosecutors but said that for the community, "I really feel that there is more to be done." He said there were still no black businesses downtown.

Schwerner's widow, Rita Schwerner Bender, praised the verdict, calling it "a day of great importance to all of us." But she said others also should be held responsible for the slayings.

"Preacher Killen didn't act in a vacuum," Bender said. "The state of Mississippi was complicit in these crimes and all the crimes that occurred, and that has to be opened up."

Killen's relatives left the courtroom without speaking to reporters.

Outside the courthouse, defense lawyer James McIntyre, said he will file an appeal, noting that the defense had objected to giving the jurors the manslaughter option.

"At least he wasn't found guilty of a willful and wanton act," McIntyre said.

"Forget about the elements of the crime. I think these jurors wanted to send some sort of a message, short of a murder conviction, and I think they accomplished that," Cohen said. "It's a verdict that says that these folks believe Killen had something to do with those long-ago murders even if the details aren't exactly clear after all this time."

"You see compromise verdicts when juries are hung up between guilty and not guilty and clearly this jury yesterday was hung up that way," Cohen added. "So this is obviously a compromise verdict but that is probably little solace to Killen."

Prosecutors had asked the jury to send a message to the rest of the world that Mississippi has changed and is committed to bringing to justice those who killed to preserve segregation in the 1960s. They said the evidence was clear that Killen organized the attack on the three victims.

Killen's lawyers conceded he was in the Klan but said that did not make him guilty. They pointed out that prosecutors offered no witnesses or evidence that put Killen at the scene of the crime. Killen did not take the stand, but has long claimed that he was at a wake at a funeral home when the victims were killed.

While Killen was indicted on murder charges, which could carry a life sentence, prosecutors asked the judge to allow the jury to consider the lesser charge of manslaughter, which has a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison for each of the three manslaughter counts.

Attorney General Jim Hood said earlier that with a murder charge, prosecutors had to prove intent to kill. With a manslaughter charge, he said, prosecutors had to prove only that a victim died while another crime was being committed.

"There's justice for all in Mississippi," Hood said after the verdicts were announced.

Killen was only person ever brought up on murder charges in the case by the state of Mississippi.

Killen, a part-time preacher and sawmill operator, was tried in 1967 on federal charges of violating the victims' civil rights. But the all-white jury deadlocked, with one juror saying she could not convict a preacher. Seven others were convicted, but none served more than six years.

The trial moved along swiftly, with testimony over only four days. Many of the witnesses from the 1967 trial now dead; this time, their testimony was read aloud to the jury from the transcripts.

Chaney, a black Mississippian, and Goodman and Schwerner, white New Yorkers, were in Neshoba County to look into the torching of a black church and help register black voters during what was called Freedom Summer.

The three were stopped for speeding on the night of the attack, jailed briefly, and then released, after which they were followed out of town by a gang of Klansmen and intercepted.

Witnesses -- primarily Klansmen -- testified that Killen was a local Klan organizer who led meetings where members discussed the "elimination" of Schwerner, whom they called "Goatee" because of his beard.

Witnesses said on the day of the slayings, Killen drove about 35 miles to Meridian and rounded up carloads of Klansmen to intercept the three men in their station wagon. According to testimony, Killen told some Klansmen to get plastic gloves and helped arrange for a bulldozer to bury the bodies.