Chris Lawrence is unconvinced that the Edgar Ray Killen verdict was a coup for the defense. In the sense that a 20 year sentence for an 80-year-old on oxygen with two broken legs is a death sentence anyway, he's right.

In the sense that Killen was not convicted of murder, either by deliberate design, depraved heart, or cruelty, it's a coup for the defense. Circuit Court Judge Bobby Delaughter, who together with Ed Peters successfully prosecuted psychotic racist Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers, gave a lecture regarding the trial to the Ole Miss Law School in 1999, before Beckwith's conviction was affirmed. He told us that he and Ed Peters deliberately chose not to ask for a manslaughter instruction, both because the evidence didn't require it, and because it would send a message that the DA had been pushed into the prosecution for political reasons, and murder is not a crime that should be prosecuted for a political purpose.

That is my chief complaint with the manslaughter instruction, and the conviction. Because of the peculiarity of Mississippi's murder law, a defendant who is on the evidence guilty of murder can be convicted only of manslaughter without error attaching. But this is a decision the jury should be allowed to make, without the State telegraphing AS IT DID WITH ITS MOTION. When, immediately before trial, the State asks for a special instruction on manslaughter when murder is the real crime, it indicates a severe weakness in the case, and also that the indictment is deeply flawed.