The Case That Will Not Die : Prosecutors are right to reinstate charges in Medgar Evers’ murder

There was a time in the 1960s when the name of Byron De La Beckwith was briefly famous, even notorious. Beckwith, an active white supremacist, was charged with the assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers in Jackson, Miss., in 1963. The evidence against Beckwith included his rifle, found 150 feet from the murder scene with his fingerprint on its telescopic sight. But two trials in 1964 ended with juries unable to reach a verdict. For more than 26 years the retired fertilizer salesman, still an active segregationist, has lived in freedom, most recently in Tennessee.

The Beckwith trials were depressingly familiar examples of how racially charged cases were typically handled in Mississippi. At the first trial, before a judge who was an admitted segregationist, the prosecutor asked the all-white jury, “Do you believe it is a crime to kill a n-----?” Gov. Ross Barnett, a champion of segregation, appeared at one of the trials and made a show of shaking Beckwith’s hand in the presence of the jury. Little more than a year ago it was learned that the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, at the time the state agency set up to perpetuate segregation, had screened potential jurors in the two trials. In the climate of those days the wonder wasn’t so much that a Mississippi jury couldn’t agree on Beckwith’s guilt or innocence, but that he wasn’t simply acquitted outright.

But as with other infamous crimes the killing of Medgar Evers is a case that will not die. Prosecutors in Jackson have now reinstated murder charges against Beckwith and are seeking to extradite him from Tennessee to again stand trial. The prosecutors say they acted on the basis of new evidence, including witnesses who were not called to testify in the earlier trials but who have now “courageously” come forward.

Beckwith is fighting extradition. Some will sympathize with him, in the belief that old wounds shouldn’t be reopened, that justice is not served by reviving a generation-old case, that it is wrong to prosecute a man who is now 70 and ailing. The fundamental and irreparable wrong, though, occurred on June 12, 1963, when Medgar Evers was shot in the back because he was fighting for racial justice.

There is no statute of limitations on murder. Those who committed racially motivated hate killings, no matter how long ago, should know that they can never feel wholly safe from legal retribution. Like Nazi war criminals, these persons should live in constant fear that the forces of justice will go on pursuing them, if need be unto the grave.