Killen Jury: We're Deadlocked

For the past four decades, Edgar Ray Killen has faded into the fabric of this rural Mississippi community, reaching his golden years with family and friends, preaching the occasional wedding and funeral, and operating his sawmill.

On Monday, the 80-year-old part-time preacher and former Ku Klux Klansman watched from his wheelchair as prosecutors asked a jury to bring him to justice in the 1964 nightrider murders of three civil rights workers.

"Those three boys and their families were robbed of all the things that Edgar Ray Killen has been able to enjoy for these last 40 years," District Attorney Mark Duncan said in closing arguments.

If convicted, Killen could spend his remaining years behind bars.

The 12 jurors, nine white and three black, began deliberating Killen's fate on the eve of the 41st anniversary of the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

Jurors deliberated for about two and a half hours before going home without a verdict. At the end of the day, the judge polled jurors to determine how they were progressing, and the panel reported being deadlocked 6-6. The judge then told them to return Tuesday to resume deliberations.

"These people, and I'm not just talking about the jurors but just about everyone involved in this case, are acting like they have non-refundable tickets for a cruise later in the week and they don't intend to let a murder trial get in the way of their travel plans," CBS News Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen said.

"I have never seen a case seem so rushed as this one as been," Cohen added. "From the 15-minute opening statements to the jury coming back after only a few hours and declaring themselves deadlock. There is a reason they call it 'deliberations.' It is supposed to be a slow, thoughtful process. Not a rush for the doors.

"If this isn't the quickest deadlock in legal history it's got to be close."

Defense Attorney James McIntyre said that while the events that occurred in 1964 were horrible and he had sympathy for the families of the victims, "the burden of proof does not reflect any guilt whatsoever" on the part of Killen.

McIntyre acknowledged that Killen was once a Klan member, but added: "He's not charged with being a member of the Klan. He's charged with murder." He then pointed out that no witnesses could put Killen at the scene of the crime. Killen did not take the stand.

"If you vote your conscience you are voting not guilty," he said. "There is a reasonable doubt."

The three victims were helping register black voters when they were ambushed by a gang of Klansmen on June 21, 1964. They were shot and their bodies were found 44 days later buried in an earthen dam.

Prosecutors are relying on FBI records and witnesses, some who had testified in a 1967 federal conspiracy trial and have since died, to show that Killen organized carloads of men who followed Chaney, a black man from Mississippi, and Schwerner and Goodman, white men from New York, on the night they were killed.

"Because the guilt of Edgar Ray Killen is so clear, there is only one question left," Duncan said. "Is a Neshoba County jury going to tell the rest of the world that we are not going to let Edgar Ray Killen get away with murder any more? Not one day more."

The disappearance of the three victims 41 years ago focused the nation's attention on the Jim Crow code of segregation in the South and helped spur passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The case marks Mississippi's latest attempt to bring to justice those who beat and murdered in the name of segregation in the 1950s and '60s.

In 1994, Mississippi won the conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 sniper killing of state NAACP leader Medgar Evers.

State prosecutors also have reopened an investigation into the murder of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta. Till was kidnapped from his uncle's home in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white girl. Three days later, the 14-year-old's mutilated body was found in a river.

Neighboring Alabama has also prosecuted some long-ago civil rights crimes in recent years. Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted in 2002 of killing four black girls in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963 - the deadliest act of the civil rights era. A year earlier, Thomas Blanton was convicted in the bombing.

"That's not the Neshoba County I know," Duncan said in contrasting today's community with the violence and hatred of 1964. "People here don't treat people that way."

Prosecutors said that while there was no testimony putting the murder weapon in Killen's hands, the evidence showed he was a Klan organizer and had played a personal role in preparations the day of the murders.

"He was in the Klan and he was a leader," Attorney General Jim Hood said.

Killen was tried in 1967 along with several others on federal charges of violating the victims' civil rights. The all-white jury deadlocked in Killen's case, with one juror saying later she could not convict a preacher. Seven others were convicted but none served more than six years.

The defense rested Monday after a former mayor testified that the Klan was a "peaceful organization." Harlan Majure, who was mayor of this Mississippi town in the 1990s, said Killen was a good man and that the part-time preacher's Klan membership would not change his opinion.

Majure said the Klan "did a lot of good up here" and said he was not personally aware of the organization's bloody past.

"As far as I know it's a peaceful organization," Majure said. His comment was met with murmurs in the packed courtroom.