A FORMER preacher from Mississippi, who is wheelchair-bound, was jailed for 60 years yesterday for the killings of three young civil rights activists in 1964.

Edgar Ray Killen, who worked as a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, was sentenced to a maximum 20 years for each of three manslaughter counts against him, a landmark verdict in the South, where Klansmen have been regarded as above the law.

The ambush, beatings and murders of Michael Schwerner, 24, Andrew Goodman, 20, and James Chaney, 21, inspired the 1988 Hollywood movie Mississippi Burning.

Schwerner and Goodman were white New Yorkers; Chaney was a black Mississippian. The men had been helping blacks to register to vote.

As he sentenced the 80- year-old Killen, Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon said: “I have taken into consideration that there are three lives involved in this case and the three lives should absolutely be respected.”

Killen’s wife, Betty Jo, pushed past security guards to give her husband three kisses on the cheek before he was wheeled out of the courtroom. He was then put in a sheriff’s vehicle and driven away.

Jim Hood, the attorney- general of Mississippi, said that Killen would be taken to the state prison in Rankin County, where he would be held in solitary confinement.

Mr Hood added that Killen had expressed no remorse for his crimes.

“I know at some point he’ll get to the realisation that you don’t get to Heaven unless you admit what you’ve done and ask for forgiveness,” the prosecutor said.

After Killen’s trial, the jury was deadlocked on a first- degree murder verdict. It compromised with manslaughter charges instead. The defence plans to appeal by claiming that the manslaughter charges should not have been allowed by the judge.

The three victims had gone to Neshoba County during the “Freedom Summer” of 1964 to investigate the burning of a black church.

They were held at a police station on trumped-up speeding charges, then released late at night and ambushed by members of the Klan and the police.

Their bodies, badly beaten and ripped up by bullets, were dumped in a pre-dug trench. During the trial, witnesses and FBI records showed that Killen had organised cars to follow the victims and run them off the road. He also told fellow Klansmen to wear plastic gloves and helped to arrange for a bulldozer to bury the bodies.

Testimony was read in court from witnesses who have since died. One had quoted Killen as saying: “We took care of the civil rights workers.”

Killen did not give testimony. He has always maintained that he was at a wake at an undertaker’s on the night of the murders.

Killen was originally put on trial for violating the civil rights of the victims in 1967 but was acquitted when one juror said that she could not convict a preacher. Prosecutors decided to reopen the case after Killen declared that he would organise a Ku Klux Klan rally for the Mississippi Annual State Fair in Jackson, Mississippi.

The trial was delayed, however, when the defendant, a former sawmill operator, broke both his legs while chopping wood. He has been in a wheelchair since then.

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