Philadelphia, Miss. – With 41-year-old evidence and many witnesses now dead, the state just could not prove its case for murder against Edgar Ray Killen, 80, accused of orchestrating the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers, juror Warren Paprocki said Tuesday.
“But we could reach a consensus on manslaughter,” Paprocki said.
Killen, on the 41st anniversary of the Ku Klux Klan- sponsored murders in rural east-central Mississippi, was convicted Tuesday and taken into custody by Neshoba County deputies. He faces up to 20 years in prison for each of the three counts of manslaughter.
As a prior convicted felon – for making threatening phone calls in the 1970s – he faces a minimum of one year for each count. He will be sentenced Thursday.
“For conviction of murder, the way our instructions read, (Killen) would have either had to pull the trigger himself or have had it done at his explicit directions,” said Paprocki, 55, an engineer and Southern California native who moved to Neshoba County 13 years ago.
“If any witness had come up and said, ‘Yeah, he told us to do that,’ there would have been strong sentiment to convict him on murder. But they didn’t have that.”
Killen was accused of rounding up a posse of Klansmen and law officers to kill James Chaney of Meridian, Miss., and New Yorkers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three workers registering black people to vote during the “Freedom Summer” campaign of 1964.
The three were lured to town to investigate the burning of a black church, arrested on a trumped-up speeding charge and then ambushed after they were released from jail late that night.
Paprocki said: “What I believe they did prove is that Edgar Ray Killen, on the 21st of June 1964, went down to Meridian and got himself a group of guys and told them there were three civil rights workers who ‘need their butts tore up’ – his words. He met them up in Neshoba and showed them around, then he went off to establish his alibi.
“What he had done was set up the commission of a felony, for those armed guys to tear their butts up. In the commission of that felony, somebody killed them. That makes Edgar Ray Killen, per our instructions, guilty of manslaughter.”
The verdict quickly became the subject of much second-guessing and speculation in the media.
Some observers, including members of the victims’ families, questioned whether the decision of the jury of nine white people and three blacks is an indication that Neshoba County still has vestiges of intolerance and fear from its violent, racist past.
Paprocki, bemused as he listened to the Rev. Al Sharpton analyzing the verdict on TV, said, “There was none of that” – neither racism nor fear – in the jury’s deliberation or verdict.
He added, “I don’t recall Rev. Sharpton being present in the courtroom.”
“The state simply did not provide the evidence for first-degree murder,” Paprocki said. “One of the other jurors grew up near Mount Zion Church, the one that was burned. That juror said, ‘Just show me one good piece of evidence, and I’ll convict in a heartbeat.’ They said it’s been a source of shame for people in Neshoba County for so long. There was no sympathy for Killen on our jury. But we took our instructions very seriously.”
Jury forewoman Shirley Vaughn, 56, would only say, “We did the best with the evidence we were given.”
The jury may still be out on what the verdict means in the eyes of the nation for Neshoba County and Mississippi, which have borne the stigma of the murders and the failure to prosecute for years.
This image was strengthened in no small part by the motion picture “Mississippi Burning.”
“I know there were plenty of good people in Neshoba County in 1964,” said District Attorney Mark Duncan, who helped prosecute Killen. “Today, we’ve shown the people of the rest of the country we won’t be tainted or described by a Hollywood movie anymore. I’m one of y’all, too, and for too long we’ve borne the burden of what was done by a handful of people 41 years ago.
“While we can’t undo what was done 41 years ago, at least now, in 2005, Mississippi has done what it could.”
But Marty Wiseman, director of the Stennis Institute of Government at Mississippi State University, said: “Anyone analyzing this has to ask, if this wasn’t murder, what is? To go through all of this and get right up to the precipice of cleansing our souls, then back up a few steps seems kind of disappointing.”
