‘Mississippi Burning’ judge
The unflappable state judge who presided over the “Mississippi Burning” trial — in which a defendant accused in the 1964 killing of three civil rights workers was convicted four decades later — died Thursday.
Retired Mississippi Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon died at St. Dominic Hospital in Jackson, the state Administrative Office of the Courts said. He was 84. A cause of death was not immediately available. He had fallen and broken a hip last month.
In 2005, Gordon sentenced Edgar Ray Killen to 60 years in prison after a mixed-race jury convicted the reputed former Ku Klux Klan leader of manslaughter in one of the civil-rights era’s most notorious acts of violence — the 1964 kidnapslaying of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman in Neshoba County.
Killen was a childhood acquaintance of the judge, and from the same hometown. It was one of many connections that made the trial an intensely personal episode that divided Neshoba County neighbors and family members.
The revival of the cold case from the civil rights era also marked the first time state prosecutors had brought charges in what the FBI called the “Mississippi Burning” investigation, which inspired a movie of the same name.
Killen was convicted 41 years to the day after the killings. Two days later, Gordon — who had been a lawyer in his thirties at the time of the killings — sentenced Killen to the maximum of 20 years on each of the three counts of manslaughter.
“Each life has value. Each life is equally as valuable as the other life and I have taken that into consideration,” Gordon said at the sentencing.
Killen, 91, remains in prison.
Born Oct. 22, 1931, Gordon grew up in Union, Miss., just down the road from Killen. Gordon’s parents had attended a church where Killen preached. Killen even conducted the combined funeral for Gordon’s parents a year after the murders.
Mostly, Gordon was praised for his decisions in the Killen case. Gordon maintained to a Times reporter that the killings of the three activists “was not the act of Neshoba County. That was the act of a small, howling mob.”
Gordon won a hardfought reelection campaign in 2014. He died less than three months after retiring as the longest-serving state circuit judge in Mississippi, with 37 years on the bench.