Thursday, June 23, 2005

Yeah, Right

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. (Reuters) - Former Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was sentenced on Thursday to 60 years in prison for orchestrating the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers who were registering black voters in Mississippi.

A jury convicted the 80-year-old former preacher on Tuesday on three counts of felony manslaughter, finding that he organized a posse to kidnap, beat and shoot the three young men. The notorious crime galvanized the civil rights movement and was dramatized in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning."
Great. The American justice system is just corrupt enough to give a murderer forty years of freedom, and is now just cruel enough to sentence an octogenarian to spend his last days in jail. So... hooray?

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