Mississippi: Delayed Justice

Delayed Justice

Byron de la Beckwith was a happy man in 1964 when two different all-white juries deadlocked on whether he was guilty of shooting black civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Jackson, Miss. But Beckwith's tribulations are far from over: last week the avowed white supremacist and former fertilizer salesman, now 70, was arrested in Tennessee and charged once again with the 1963 killing.

The case was revived after more than a quarter-century by Jackson's daily Clarion-Ledger, which last year ran a series of investigative stories on Beckwith's earlier trials. That prompted Hinds County district attorney Ed Peters and assistant D.A. Bobby...

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