Jury selection begins in 1964 Miss. murder case

Familiar questions, touchy subject
The tableau — lawyers questioning would-be jurors about their thoughts on race before picking them to judge facts in crimes that date to the civil rights era — has become a familiar one in the South.

Rita Schwerner Bender, the widow of a civil rights worker killed elsewhere in Mississippi in 1964, said there is value in American society re-examining long-dormant cases from an era of racial brutality.

“On the one hand, you could say it’s old because it happened so long ago,” Bender said in an interview from her law office in Seattle. “On the other hand, the very fact that there has been no acknowledgment until now indicates that it is not old history. It’s present business.”

Mitch Moran, a lawyer who represented the man convicted in Michael Schwerner’s death, disagreed. He called the revival of decades-old cases “a political movement.”

“It’s a new thing, I guess, digging these cases up, trying to find a jury that is going to apply the law and not feel like they are supposed to come up with a certain verdict,” said Moran, of Carthage, Miss.

Moran defended Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen in 2005, when the state of Mississippi brought the first murder case in the slayings of Michael Schwerner and fellow civil-rights workers James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. A jury convicted Killen of manslaughter, and he is serving a 60-year sentence.

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