Pat Shannan's MUSINGS
Inside A Political Trial
Philadephia, Miss. - June 21, 2005
By Pat Shannan
In the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, for the murder of three civil rights workers on a Sunday night 41 years ago today, the jury remained deadlocked 6 to 6 after five hours. Reporting that further argument in the deliberation room was fruitless, the twelve jurors asked Judge Marcus Gordon for permission to focus on the "compromise" charge of manslaughter and, granted that, were able to unanimously agree in only a matter of minutes.
Even defense attorney James McIntyre had surprised reporters on the street days earlier by agreeing that the charges should have been brought but further added, "Not now."
"They are at least 35 years late," he said. "This is nothing more than a political trial and to subject this old man to this hardship at this late date is a travesty of justice as big as the first one that denied justice to the three young men forty years ago."
Again in his closing statement, McIntyre called it a political trial and wondered why Attorney General Jim Hood, who insisted upon participating in the prosecution, had singled out this particular forty-year-old case - concluding that there could be no other motivation beyond "political."
"Crime in Mississippi has increased by 3000 per cent since this 1964 murder case," McIntyre told the jury, pointing out that there were but 1,500 prison inmates that year and now there are 45,000. "Why isn't the State of Mississippi going after the criminals who are a danger to our fellow citizens instead of this 80-year-old man in a wheel chair, carrying an oxygen tank?"
A quick calculation tells us that in order to produce the same amount of criminals at the 1964 rate from the approximate two million population at the time, Mississippi would now need sixty million people. What has created this enormous increase in crime? That's the elephant in the living room that politicians and news people continue to ignore.
That a "hung jury" was likely was predictable. We saw it coming from the early moments that the attorneys began to attempt to seat a jury. However, the manslaughter charge was not in the indictment and will likely become a challenge by the defense on appeal.
James McIntyre has been a friend of mine for twenty years. With access to "inside" information that the mass of establishment reporters did not have, I took full advantage of it by riding the hour and a half each way from Jackson to Philadelphia for the Saturday session with him. The knowledge derived from that trip provided me enough insight to tell at least dozen people by Monday that the jury would be deadlocked by Tuesday night. Here's why.
A week earlier, during the voir dire, McIntyre had been frustrated "probably sixty times" (out of the some 150 in the jury pool) by the obstinacy of so many prospective jurors, both black and white, who refused to agree to judge the facts without any preconceived notions.
He said, "When we asked the standard `Can you get rid of any prejudiced opinions that you may have formed from news stories and TV in recent weeks and assess this case from the evidence alone,' I was amazed at how many actually said they could not.
"One guy, I will never forget - I'll give you his name from the transcript, if you want it - listened to all that and said, "Yes sir, I'm sure I can, but I'm still gonna' vote `Not Guilty!'" The man was, of course, a white Neshoba Countian.
But on the other side of the same coin, McIntyre provided another story that no other newspaper in the country would dare print. When a black man, obviously educated beyond the norm, was asked the same penetrating question during the voir dire, he replied, "Sir, I certainly would like to think that I can. But the problem is, if I vote `Not Guilty,' I will not be able to go back home to my neighborhood."
Of course, neither of these men was chosen for jury duty, but the portrayal of attitudes from each side was enough to tell us that the three African Americans who did get on the jury were not going to budge either, probably for the same reason; and it was likely that some of the nine whites would be just as adamant. Hence, the hung jury was not a difficult prediction. Only the last minute insertion by the court that the jury could consider "manslaughter" as a viable compromise prevented the walkaway tie score at six to six.
Another interesting tidbit that came out at trial, unknown to most of the world, including Mississippians at this late date, is the fact that the KKK was almost non-existent in Neshoba County at the time of the murders, and most of the Klansmen involved had been only very recently recruited in Meridian in Lauderdale County some thirty-plus miles away. James Jordan, who is now deceased but whose transcript from the 1967 federal trial was used here, said that he was recruited into the Klan in March of 1964 and that his number was "3."
Every other Klan member questioned testified that he had been recruited in either April or May of that year - only a month or two before the June 21st tragedy. It became apparent that none of the members of the kidnapping mob had been a long time KKK member.
This is not to deny the Klan's existence but only to point out how insignificant it was in the Mississippi society, contrary to Morris Dees and the SPLC propaganda of recent years. Of course, the numbers are even far fewer today with but an occasional hanger-on to be found anywhere.
In 1955, when young Emmitt Till of Chicago was beaten and finally shot to death by two Tallahatchie County rednecks - J. W. Milan and Roy Bryant - ALL Mississippians, black and white, were outraged at the crime. This was made blatantly obvious in a matter of months when the two perpetrators were so ostracized by the community that they were forced to leave the state for economic survival.
And while the young Till boy committed far worse infractions than just the oft-reported "wolf whistle" (subjecting the young married woman to rude and vulgar and repeated propositions that would have even earned a thrashing for a white boy of the era), the simple explanation was that nobody, black or white, would pretend to support the despicable over-reaction by shopping at Bryant's country store anymore.
I report this only to defend the good and honorable and law-abiding people of Mississippi who have taken it on the nose for fifty years as being as heinous as the miniscule criminal few in the '50s and '60s who were responsible for the violence in the state. I well remember the front license plates on a few thousand cars that barked, "Mississippi - The Most Lied About State in the Nation!"
Others of the era took political advantage of the racially charged climate. The FBI behaved almost as unlawfully as the KKK, stopping only, as far as we know, at murder.
One outrageous report, told by the victim's attorney Travis Buckley of Ellisville, had the FBI actually kidnapping a reputed Klansman from the streets of Laurel, Mississippi in 1967 and taking him to a motel in Alabama (across the state line - a federal offense) where they placed a gun barrel in his mouth, along with other motivation, in order to coerce information out of him. When they were unsuccessful - either because the terrified victim was loyal to his confederates or just didn't really know much - the Fibbies went to the man's home and lied to his wife that they suspected that her husband had been kidnapped by the KKK and that she needed to tell them the names of all his associates so they might be able to save his life.
In 1995, retired FBI Agent Bill Stringer of Jackson signed a sworn affidavit explaining how two of his colleagues in 1973 planted a dynamite bomb on the back seat of Byron De La Beckwith's Oldsmobile, successfully framing him on a criminal charge (after he crossed the state line) that resulted in a five-year stretch in Angola Penitentiary for Beckwith.
But nobody took better advantage of the political climate in 1976 than a Mississippi attorney named Andy N., whose last name we will not reveal for his protection. Vigorously campaigning for his man in the governor's race, Andy joined both the KKK and the NAACP and was able to convince both groups that Cliff Finch would be the best man for their best interests. Indeed, both sides came out in support of Finch, and he won the governorship.
It's just another piece of good-ol-boy history that will forever live in Mississippi folklore.
The trial in Philadelphia was a political trial, just as every other one in the past ten years has been that dealt with decades-old crimes, and just as every new trial that is hoisted from the dregs of history will also be. The goal is not justice anymore but headlines and votes.