Mississippi Turning: Inside the Killen Jury

An explaination of why Edgar Ray Killen got a Manslaughter conviction instead of a Murder conviction as explained by Warren Paprocki, an engineer in Philadelphia, Miss. and a member of the Killen jury:

"The jury was initially split between those who felt he was guilty and wanted to convict him of murder and those who felt he was guilty and were frustrated because the state did not present sufficient evidence to convict him under the jury instructions.

"Still, we followed the law and the court's instructions. We did not enter into some exercise of "jury nullification" in which jurors vote according to their convictions rather than by the law as prescribed either for or against Killen. As it was put to me by a fellow juror: "If your brother was on trial here, wouldn't you want him tried according to the law?"

"In order to convict Killen on murder charges, according to our jury instructions, it had to be proved that he had pulled the trigger or that others had been acting under his specific direction to kill the three men. What we heard in court was that Killen told some people in Meridian that three civil rights workers "needed their asses tore up" and then showed these people where to sit and wait for the three in Philadelphia. But it was not established that he gave them any instructions to perform a specific act..."