Short confinement

last updated 8 January 2015

Philadelphia, Miss.

A former Ku Klux Klan leader was released on bond this week, after serving just six weeks of a 60-year sentence for planning the 1964 killings of three civil-rights workers. Edgar Ray Killen, 80, was convicted of manslaughter 41 years to the day after the murders, which helped galvanize the civil-rights movement and inspired the 1988 film Mississippi Burning. A judge said he had no choice but to release Killen pending his appeal, which could take years, because he poses no flight risk. But a local newspaper publisher, James Prince III, said the prospect of Killen living out his days as a free man reopens old wounds. “It’s difficult to bring closure on the reign of terror with him out of prison,” he said.