Word: conviction
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Southern prosecutors trying to convict white men of civil rights murders...
...become axiomatic that Southern white men do not convict other Southern white men for racist murders. To fanatic white supremacists, the growing list of acquittals and mistrials signaled open season; they went on the hunt with bullets and dynamite. In at least 34 killings since 1960, only one such murderer was punished. Last week in Alabama, all-white juries convicted four white defendants in two notorious cases in which a stranger in a car had been killed on a dark, lonely road...
...already-familiar story told in damning detail by Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informant planted in the Ku Klux Klan, who testified that he rode with the killers when they gunned down Mrs. Liuzzo. Despite his first-hand testimony, juries in two state trials had failed to convict Collie LeRoy Wilkins, 22, on murder charges. The significant difference in federal court last week was that Wilkins and two fellow Klansmen, Eugene Thomas, 42, and William Orville Eaton, 41, were prosecuted under an 1870 federal statute that makes it a crime to conspire to deprive a citizen of his constitutional rights...
...coercing the proof out of the defendant's own mouth. So absolute is the privilege against self-incrimination that the defendant need not even take the stand. But what of police interrogation-the preliminary stage at which a suspect is pressed to make the very confession that may convict him at the trial...
...crime punishable by state courts -- such an intimidation, injury or murder -- while intending to prevent someone from exercising rights guaranteed by the Constitution or federal laws (which is a federal crime), he should be liable to prosecution in the federal courts for both crimes. At present, federal courts can convict the murderer of a civil rights worker only of depriving the worker of his constitutional rights, for which the maximum penalty is ten years in prison. Under the proposed statute, such a killer could be given a sentence comparable to that prescribed for murder by state...