Civil rights murder defendant goes to hospital
PHILADELPHIA, Mississippi (CNN) -- The accused mastermind in the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers left a Mississippi courtroom Thursday on a stretcher, prompting an indefinite trial recess.
Defendant Edgar Ray Killen, 80, a former Ku Klux Klansman, complained of not feeling well before his courtroom exit. He sat upright on the stretcher that carried him to an ambulance.
His attorney, Mitch Moran, cited concerns about his client's blood pressure.
Judge Marcus Gordon declared a recess on the first day of testimony in the decades-old case revisiting Mississippi's haunted segregationist past.
Killen, a part-time Baptist preacher, comes to court in a wheelchair because of an accident that broke both his legs, and his attorneys maintain he isn't well enough for a trial.
Earlier, the judge ruled that testimony from Killen's 1967 federal civil rights trial could be used in his state murder trial, which started Wednesday.
In 1967, an all-white jury deadlocked on whether to find Killen guilty. The holdout said she could not vote to convict a preacher.
Seven others were convicted of conspiring to violate the civil rights of the three victims -- Michael Schwerner, 24; James Chaney, 21; and Andrew Goodman, 20 -- but none served more than six years in prison.
Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were arrested for speeding on the night of June 21, 1964, while on their way to investigate the burning of a black church. After their release from a county jail in Philadelphia, Klansmen pursued them, forced their car off the road and shot them.
Forty-four days later, FBI agents found their bodies under 15 feet of dirt.
Schwerner and Goodman were white New Yorkers who joined other activists in the South for "Freedom Summer." Chaney was a black Mississippian.
The case was depicted in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning."
The prosecution's first witness Thursday was Schwerner's widow, Rita Bender, who described her feelings "the day that the burned station wagon was found."
Already notified the three were missing, she ran into another civil rights worker, Fannie Lou Hamer, at the Cincinnati, Ohio, airport on the way to Mississippi.
"We were standing and talking when we heard that the car had been burned," she said, her eyes tearing for the only time during her 45-minute testimony. "I think it really hit me for the first time that they were dead, that there was really no realistic possibility that they were still alive.
"Fannie Lou and I, Mrs. Hamer, both started to cry," she said. "She led me over to a bench, and she just wrapped her arms around me, and the two of us had our faces together, and our tears were mingling together."
In his opening statement Wednesday, Mississippi Attorney General James Hood told jurors that former Klan members cooperating with prosecutors would testify about Killen's involvement in the case.
Hood discussed the backgrounds of the victims and pointed to surviving family members in the courtroom, including Bender and Chaney's brother, Ben.
Defense attorney Moran told jurors that Killen may have known about the slayings but he didn't plan or carry them out. Moran said the issue before the jury was who committed the killings, adding their feelings about the Klan or membership in the group shouldn't cloud their views about the case.
