Heavy security as "Mississippi Burning" trial opens

[Jahness]

Heavy security as "Mississippi Burning" trial opens

Tue Jun 14, 9:53 AM ET

The trial of an 80-year-old alleged member of the racist Ku Klux Klan, charged with killing three civil rights workers in Mississippi 41 years ago, opened here amid tight security.

The deaths of Michael Schwerner, 24, Andy Goodman, 20, and James Chaney, 21, garnered a world audience with the Hollywood movie "Mississippi Burning." Now the trial of Edgar Ray Killen is shining a fresh spotlight on the southern state's painful past.

Reflecting the emotionally charged nature of the case, roads around the courthouse in the small Mississippi town of Philadelphia were cut off as potential jurors arrived under police surveillance.

After a jury is chosen, opening arguments are expected to start Wednesday. Lawyers said the trial would last several weeks.

Among those expected to testify are the mothers of Goodman and Chaney and the widow of Schwerner, who had lived for six months in Mississippi before his death.

Killen, once a sawmill operator and part-time Baptist minister, was arrested in January and charged with organising the murders.

He suffered two broken legs in a fall in March and he will have a private room with a bed at the court for use throughout the trial. He was brought to court in a wheelchair and did not speak to reporters.

Killen has pleaded not guilty and has said his "conscience is clear" in interviews about events 40 years ago when he was alleged to be a member of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan organization.

Attorney General Jim Hood, who is prosecuting the case, said jury selection is going "a little slow," but he expects the trial to last ten or 12 days.

Killen's attorney, James McIntyre, told CNN that the trial marked "a sad day" in state history.

"Mississippi needs to move forward, not backward. This matter was closed some 40 years ago. The state is attempting to open old wounds," McIntyre said.

Ben Chaney, the brother of James Chaney, said: "I'm ready for the truth."

"I hope this process provides an opening for closure, an opening for truth," the victim's brother said as he attended Monday's proceedings.

Chaney, who said a trial was needed for all those who participated in his brother's killing, also called for a probe into the state for potentially hindering prosecutions.

"Freedom Summer" in 1964 drew thousands of activists from northern US states, mostly young whites, to the racially segregated south in an attempt to bring social change by registering blacks to vote.

Schwerner and Goodman were young white men from New York who teamed up with Chaney, a black activist from Mississippi. The three were returning from a black church that had been burned down when they were arrested on June 21 and accused of speeding.

After several hours in Philadelphia's police station they were released in the dead of night. Following a terrifying chase, two carloads of men -- Klan members and police -- ambushed them.

Their bodies, beaten and riddled with bullets, were dumped under an earth dam and only found 44 days later following an intense FBI manhunt.

Amid hostile silence from locals and under smothering heat, federal agents carried out a dogged investigation, evoked on screen in Alan Parker's 1988 "Mississippi Burning" starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe.

Eighteen clan members including Killen were indicted in 1964. Seven were convicted by an all-white jury of violating the dead men's civil rights and sentenced in 1967 to prison terms of three to 10 years.

But Killen was acquitted. A woman on the jury said she could not bring herself to condemn a preacher.

The case was reopened in 2004 and Killen is now accused of orchestrating the murders, but the men suspected of carrying them out, according to witness accounts, are no longer alive.

The Ku Klux Klan says it has told members to stay away from the trial.

"If there's any Klan protest, it won't be any of us," said Richard Greene, Imperial Wizard of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. "We don't believe it's appropriate. A man's life is at stake here."

However, a man identified as J.J. Harper handed out business cards identifying himself as imperial wizard of the American White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, greeted Killan and offered words of encouragement outside the courthouse.

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