State judge in 'Mississippi Burning' trial dies at age 84
Source: Associated Press
State judge in 'Mississippi Burning' trial dies at age 84
Emily Wagster Pettus, Associated Press
Updated 5:43 pm, Thursday, May 26, 2016
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The state judge who presided over the "Mississippi Burning" trial in 2005 has died.
Retired Mississippi Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon died Thursday at St. Dominic Hospital in Jackson, the state Administrative Office of the Courts said. He was 84. A cause of death was not immediately available. A court spokeswoman said Gordon had been hospitalized after falling and breaking his hip in April.
Gordon sentenced Edgar Ray Killen to 60 years in prison after a mixed-race jury convicted the reputed former Ku Klux Klan leader of manslaughter in the 1964 kidnap-slaying of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County.
The revival of the cold case from the civil rights era marked the first time state prosecutors had brought charges in what the FBI called the "Mississippi Burning" investigation.
Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/State-judge-in-Mississippi-Burning-trial-dies-7947357.php
[center]
Edgar Ray Killen
In this Oct. 19, 1967 file photo, Neshoba County Sheriff Deputy Cecil Price,
right, with Edgar Ray Killen as they await their verdicts in the murder trial.
Kenneth Killen, brother of former Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen, smiles
while testifying in the fourth day of the Edgar Ray Killen civil rights murder trial.
Cecil Ray Price: Cecil was the deputy sheriff of Neshoba County
and the man in the center of the conspiracy to murder
Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney. [/center]
