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Mississippi Attorney General Challenges Bail for Killen

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Times Staff Writer

Mississippi’s attorney general has challenged a judge’s decision to grant bail to former Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen, who was freed from prison Friday, less than two months into his 60-year sentence.

Killen was convicted in June in Neshoba County of three counts of manslaughter in the 1964 deaths of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James E. Chaney and Michael H. Schwerner.

In an emergency petition to the state Supreme Court on Monday night, Atty. Gen. Jim Hood argued that Killen, 80, remained a violent and dangerous man.

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Hood said that a Killen relative had made death threats against Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon, and that an anonymous caller had threatened to bomb the courthouse. He also described a threat Killen made in 1974, and another alleged threat to a jailer after his conviction.

James McIntyre, Killen’s lawyer, said Hood was inappropriately raising new charges. McIntyre said he expected Killen to remain free until the Supreme Court reached a decision on his appeal, which he said could take a year or more.

“It’s always a victory for any lawyer to get their client out of jail, whether temporarily or permanently,” McIntyre said. “Many people are delighted to see him released.”

Killen’s release was a blow to those who had spent years pressing the state to try someone for murder in the three slayings.

His trial was the most recent -- and, many expect, the last -- in a line of high-profile civil rights cases reopened by a state eager to shake off its reputation for racial strife.

The jury split on the charge of murder but found Killen guilty of manslaughter. A day later, with the admonishment that “each life has value,” Gordon imposed the maximum possible sentence of 60 years.

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Killen, who has used a wheelchair since he broke his legs in a logging accident in March, was sent to the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility for a de facto life sentence.

But Gordon said Friday that he had no choice but to free Killen on bail during the appeal process. He said defendants in Mississippi were entitled to bond unless they were guilty of child abuse or murder, or unless the state had proved that they posed a danger.

“It’s not a matter of what I feel; it’s a matter of the law,” he said, Associated Press reported.

Gordon did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Gordon set Killen’s bail at $600,000, which was met five hours later by neighbors and friends who put up their property as collateral.

Mississippi law allows judges to grant appeal bond when the convicted person has established that he or she poses no risk, but the law uses vague language, allowing bond “when the peculiar circumstances of the case render it proper.”

Phillip Broadhead, a clinical professor in the criminal appeals program at the University of Mississippi, said Gordon had “plenty of discretion.”

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“The judge always has wiggle room,” Broadhead said. He added that it was “very rare to see an appeal bond set in this serious of a case.”

The decision infuriated members of the Magnolia Bar Assn., an organization of black lawyers and judges, who charged in a statement that “the 60-year sentence handed down by Judge Gordon meant absolutely nothing -- it was a sentence that Judge Gordon delivered in a harsh, stern voice before the national media.

“Underneath that stern voice ... we believe that Judge Gordon knew that Edgar Ray Killen would walk away a free man again,” read the statement, which called for the Mississippi Supreme Court to reverse the decision.

“There are so many people out there who are so bitterly angry over this,” said Fenton DeWeese, a member of the Philadelphia Coalition, a multiracial group that lobbied the state to reopen the case.

“This is something I have been fearing,” he said. “They’re full of venom and hatred. They’re condemning the district attorney and the attorney general and the judge.”

Atty. Gen. Hood, who was not at Friday’s bond hearing, made the case in his emergency petition that Killen was dangerous and a flight risk.

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He described a 1974 phone call in which Killen told a woman, referring to her husband, “He’s going to crawl cause I’m ready to give him anything he wants. Would you be satisfied with him if somebody would bring him home where you wouldn’t recognize him for a week? I want that revenge. I like revenge.” Killen was convicted of telephone harassment in the case.

Hood also described a death threat made by “a relative” of Killen against Gordon.

McIntyre said Hood was referring to Killen’s 64-year-old brother, who struck a cameraman at Killen’s arraignment in January.

J.D. Killen, who lives in Bailey, Miss., said he never threatened Gordon.

“It’s not my job to say when a person’s life is over,” he said. “God almighty put it in Job 14:5. He’s the one that says when people go.

“They’ve been after the whole family,” he said. “They don’t want us to rest.”

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