DOJ Case Summary: U.S. v. Price, et al

This case involved the slaying of three young civil rights workers in rural Mississippi the summer of 1964. Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, an African-American from Meridian, Mississippi, disappeared while working to register black voters. The three young men had been apprehended on June 21, 1964 by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, who charged Chaney with speeding and ordered the other two held for investigation. They were detained for six hours and then released, with the intent of intercepting and killing them. Price and other Klan members stopped the defendants and took them to a secluded area, where they were shot and their bodies taken elsewhere to be buried.

When other civil rights workers immediately reported their disappearance, the Department of Justice, at President Johnson's urging, sent dozens of FBI agents to Mississippi. As a result of their search, the remains of the young men were discovered on August 4, 1964. After a grand jury heard evidence in the fall of 1964, it returned two indictments on January 15, 1965. The first indictment charged three law enforcement officials, including Price, and fifteen private citizens who were members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, with conspiring to deprive the three men of their 14thAmendment rights (18 U.S.C. 241). The second indictment had four counts charging the same 18 defendants with a general conspiracy of acting under color of law to deprive Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman of their civil rights.

A month later the District Court dismissed the § 241 indictment entirely and the 242 counts against the fifteen private individuals, while maintaining the conspiracy count against the private individuals. The federal Government appealed the dismissals directly to the Supreme Court, which unanimously reversed the decision, reinstating both indictments.

Trial was set for October 1966, but the indictments were again dismissed, this time based on the defendants' successful challenge to the composition of the grand jury that returned the indictments. They argued, somewhat ironically, that the jury panel that voted to indict them did not have a sufficient representation of minorities and women. The federal Government agreed to dismiss the indictments, but subsequently obtained another indictment on February 27, 1967, charging nineteen subjects with a 241 conspiracy. The following October trial began and lasted about a week, ending with the all-white jury convicting Price and six of his co-defendants and acquitting eight others. The jury could not reach a verdict on three others and one defendant was dismissed prior to trial. The convictions were upheld when the defendants were unsuccessful in their appeal to the Supreme Court.

This case represented the first successful jury conviction of white officials and Klansmen in the history of Mississippi for crimes against African-Americans and civil rights workers. A somewhat fictionalized version of this case was made into a movie in the 1980's called Mississippi Burning. At the time this incident occurred, there was no federal criminal sanction to prosecute racially-motivated acts of violence intended to interfere with the enjoyment of individual federal rights. Nevertheless, the Criminal Section was successful in using a Reconstruction era law to prosecute the perpetrators of racial violence in this case and in two other contemporaneous cases involving the deaths of another civil rights worker, Viola Liuzzo, and an African-American educator, Lemuel Penn. [ U.S.v.Wilkins, et al. (M.D. Alabama) (1965); U.S. v. Guest, et al. (M.D. Georgia) (1964) respectively]. Those prosecutions led to the creation of a Justice Department task force, with major participation by the Civil Rights Division, to develop legislation that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, federally criminalizing acts of racial violence related to the exercise of federal rights.