James Chaney - State Investigation

State Investigation

Over the years, activists had called for the state to prosecute the murders. The journalist Jerry Mitchell, an award-winning investigative reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, had discovered new evidence and written extensively about the case for six years. Mitchell had earned renown for helping secure convictions in several other high-profile Civil Rights Era murder cases, including the assassination of Medgar Evers, the Birmingham church bombing and the murder of Vernon Dahmer. He developed new evidence about the civil rights murders, found new witnesses, and pressured the State to prosecute. It began an investigation in the early years of the 2000s (decade).

In 2004 Barry Bradford, an Illinois high school teacher, and his three students, Allison Nichols, Sarah Siegel, and Brittany Saltiel, joined Mitchell's efforts in a special project. They did additional research, and created a documentary about their work. Their documentary, produced for the National History Day contest, presented important new evidence and compelling reasons for reopening the case. They obtained a taped interview with Edgar Ray Killen, who had been acquitted in the first trial. He had been an outspoken white supremacist nicknamed the "Preacher." The interview helped convince the State to reopen an investigation into the murders.

In 2005 the state charged Killen in the murders of the three activists, the only one of six living suspects to be charged. When the trial opened on January 7, 2005, he pleaded "Not guilty." Evidence was presented that he had supervised the murders. Not sure that Killen intended in advance for the activists to be killed by the Klan, the jury found him guilty of three counts of manslaughter on June 20, 2005, and he was sentenced to 60 years in prison—twenty years for each count, to be served consecutively.

Believing there are other men involved in his brother's death who should be charged as accomplices to murder, as he was, Ben Chaney has said, "I'm not as sad as I was," he adds. "But I'm still angry."