A lot has changed since the 1960s. The physical face of our entire country has been altered. So have our minds. Hopefully.
In what could be one of the last cases of its kind, an 80-year-old man was convicted on three counts of manslaughter in connection with the 1964 deaths of three civil rights workers in Mississippi.
Edgar Ray Killen's trial caught national media attention as representing yet another aspect of our nation's history that we cannot forget.
Killen, a one-time leader of the Ku Klux Klan and former part-time Baptist minister, will die in prison, or wherever they send ill, feeble criminals. He was sentenced the maximum 60 years - 20 years per victim.
On Monday, Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon denied the request for a new trial for Killen. One of Killen's defense attorneys said the defense hadn't banked on the prospect that prosecutors would have asked for jurors to have the manslaughter option.
The defense's original pretrial thought probably was: After 41 years, it would be unlikely to prove without a doubt that Killen was involved with the killings.
Although this will be brought up again in appeals, it probably won't change anything.
And it shouldn't.
No matter how much time has gone by, Killen should be held accountable for his actions, especially when they resulted in the deaths of three young men. It's important to set the record straight for the books, and that people recognize it.
Forty-one years have passed, but that is no reason to ignore what happened.
In 1967, an all-white jury reached a deadlock of 11-1 for convicting Killen. According to CNN, the one person in favor of a not-guilty verdict voted as such because she said she couldn't convict a preacher.
Now if that's not a sign of the times, the following information sure will be: Seven other men were convicted in relation to the killings. But those men served no more than six years in prison and were not convicted on murder or manslaughter charges, but rather for "conspiring to violate the civil rights of the victims." The civil rights of the victims, of course, included the right to live.
Killen should have been convicted long ago, and he knows this - as do his attorneys and everyone else.
