'Mississippi Burning' Trial Begins

A one-time Ku Klux Klansman went on trial Wednesday in the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers, with prosecutors telling the jury he organized carloads of Klansmen who chased the victims down, killed them and buried their bodies.

Attorney General Jim Hood's opening statement came shortly after 12 jurors - nine white and three black - were seated for the trial of 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen. Four whites and one black also were chosen as alternates.

In his opening statement, defense attorney Mitch Moran denied that Killen was a leader in planning the attack on Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. He did not dispute that Killen was a member of the Klan at the time of the slayings, but he said Klan membership alone did not make him guilty of murder.

"The Klan's not on trial here. Being a member of the Klan is not on trial here," Moran said. "You can't hold him accountable for something he didn't plan or orchestrate."

Moran said Killen "was just a bystander in the same organization that a lot of other people were in at the same time in Neshoba County." He added: "As repulsive as an organization like that might be, you can't find him guilty for the crime he's charged with."

But Hood said prosecutors intend to prove that Killen planned the murders and helped round up Klansmen to chase down and kill Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney when the three were released from the county jail. They had been detained after Chaney received a speeding ticket.

Hood also said testimony will show that before authorities found the bodies, Killen told people where they had been buried.

"Prosecutors have to be careful here," CBS News Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen said. "They can't put the past on trial. They can't put the culture of the South on trial. They have to be as specific and as focused as they can possibly be about Killen's precise role, if any, in the murders."

Killen served as a kleagle, or organizer, of the Klan in Neshoba County and helped set up a klavern, or local Klan group, in a nearby county, Hood said. He also alleged that Killen led an April 1964 Klan meeting at which members discussed what to do to stop "Goatee" - as Schwerner was known because of his beard - and his voter registration activities.

Testimony will show that Killen and some other local preachers used the pulpit to encourage their church members to join the Klan, Hood said.

"They told them that God sanctions it," he said.

Chaney, a black man from Mississippi, and Schwerner and Goodman, white men from New York, were beaten and shot to death in a case dramatized in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning." Their bodies were found 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam.

The killings of the three young men, who were helping to register black voters during the "Freedom Summer" of 1964, galvanized the civil rights movement and helped win passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act that same year.

Killen's name has been associated with the slayings from the outset. FBI records and witnesses indicated he organized the carloads of men who followed Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner and stopped them in their station wagon.

Killen was tried along with several others in 1967 on federal charges of violating the victims' civil rights. The all-white jury deadlocked in Killen's case, but seven others were convicted. None served more than six years. Killen is the only person ever indicted on state murder charges in the case.

"One thing to watch for is whether prosecutors offer new evidence that wasn't a part of the long-ago trial that resulted in a hung jury against Killen," Cohen said. "Any new evidence, whether it comes from witnesses or new scientific testing, will allow prosecutors to argue to jurors that this isn't just a rehash of what happened in court four decades ago."

Killen, a part-time preacher, could get life in prison if convicted. He has been free on bail and uses a wheelchair because of arthritis that was aggravated after his legs were broken in a tree-cutting accident in March.