Word: liuzzo
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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...
Also on hand was a sympathetic delegation from Alabama's Ku Klux Klan, There was 21-year-old Klansman Collie Leroy Wilkins, himself accused of murdering a civil rights worker, Detroit Housewife Viola Liuzzo; Wilkins, whose trial in the same courtroom ended in a hung jury, will return there for retrial this month. Near him sat Alabama Grand Dragon Robert Creel and a muscular, crew-cut man portentously identified as chief of the K.B.I.-the Klan Bureau of Investigation...