Word: liuzzo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...prosecution's case was much stronger than in the Anniston trial. It was the 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...
Whereupon the jury, which had already pondered the case for 24 hours, retired for three more hours and found three white Alabama Klansmen guilty of federal conspiracy charges in the death of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, the white mother of five from Detroit, who was shot to death after the Selma-Montgomery civil rights march last spring...
When Ku Klux Klansman Collie Leroy Wilkins' trial for the murder of Civil Rights Worker Viola Gregg Liuzzo ended in a mistrial last spring, it was something of a victory for the prosecution. In that Deep South Lowndes County courtroom at Hayneville, Ala., anything short of outright acquittal had to be considered a surprise. And when Wilkins went on trial again last week, the odds against conviction had not changed. Juries in that very courtroom were remembering their old racist ways. Only last month, before the same Judge T. Werth Thagard who had presided at the first Wilkins trial...
...concerned, his state's jury selection system was as much on trial as was the defendant. Relentlessly, Flowers and an assistant questioned each prospective juror, asking him whether he thought the white race superior to the Negro, whether he felt that any person like Mrs. Liuzzo who associated with Negroes thereby made herself inferior to other whites. Over vehement defense objections, Judge Thagard let Flowers get his answers. In short order, Flowers established that of 30 veniremen available for the jury, eleven felt that white civil rights workers were indeed inferior...
...tried to take over the prosecution of Thomas L. Coleman, charged with killing a white civil rights worker. This week he was back in the same courtroom, this time handling the case against Collie Leroy Wilkins Jr., accused of murdering another white civil rights worker, Mrs. Viola G. Liuzzo...