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Klansman faces new trial over plot to kill Luther King

Andrew Buncombe
Saturday 01 March 2003 01:00 GMT
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The crime for which Ernest Avants now faces a fresh trial belongs to a past generation, to a racially divided era which most in America's Deep South would like to think had changed.

But this week, 36 years after Mr Avants was cleared of murdering a black man in a Ku Klux Klan plot to assassinate the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, the language and imagery of those times have echoed around a Mississippi courtroom as the 72-year-old has gone on trial for the second time for the same murder.

"Ben Chester White [the victim] was 67 years old," the federal prosecutor Paige Fitzgerald told the court in Jackson. "His right shoe was patched together with bits of wire. His clothes were patched. He lived in a cinderblock house. The facts of this case are ugly. The words are ugly."

Mr White was an unexceptional man, a farmhand and a minister with the local Baptist church. He was not even involved on the fringes of the burgeoning civil rights movement. But, prosecutors said, in the summer of 1966 Mr White was selected by Mr Avants and two fellow conspirators to play a central part in a plot to lure Dr King to the town of Natchez where they intended to kill him.

By killing Mr White and dumping his body in the Homechitto national forest, the three KKK members hoped Dr King would be so incensed he would ignore the civil rights march that summer between Memphis and Jackson and travel instead to south-west Mississippi to investigate.

Prosecutors say their plot went at least partly to plan. The three allegedly killed Mr White, two of them shooting their victim up to 18 times with rifles before Mr Avants blew away part of his head with a shotgun. They dumped Mr White's body in the fast-flowing water of Petty Creek where it would be discovered on a Sunday afternoon by picnicking children.

That was where the plan came unstuck: for whatever reason, Dr King was not lured to Natchez and the plot of the three KKK members, who worked together at a local paper mill, foundered. Dr King was assassinated in Memphis Tennessee, two years later.

That Mr Avants is being tried in 2003 for the killing of Mr White is little short of remarkable. He was first tried in 1967, a year after Mr White's body was found. The successful argument put forward by his defence lawyer in that trial was that Mr Avants could not be guilty of murder because Mr White was already dead when his client shot him.

Mr Avants' fellow conspirators, Claude Fuller, the alleged ring-leader, and James Jones, also escaped conviction. Fuller's lawyer successfully argued that his arthritic client was too sick to stand trial, and Jones turned state's evidence against his two friends. Fuller and Jones are long since dead.

Mr Avants is also not in the best of health. Having suffered a stroke as well as a series of other ailments, he is now confined to a wheelchair and is said to find speech difficult. With the "double jeopardy" rule ensuring that the state of Mississippi could not try him again, he might have believed the alleged crime was something long ago put behind him.

And so it might have been, but for an investigation by a television news channel which discovered a very simple, but important, fact. After the three men allegedly shot and killed Mr White, they dumped his body on federal land. That made it a federal crime. Three years ago, federal prosecutors announced their intention to try Mr Avants for murder and he was indicted.

This week, the crucial issue of exactly where Mr White's body was discovered, was heard by the court. Eddie Walters, a prosecution witness, was 11 in the summer of 1966. He and his sisters discovered Mr White's body at the edge of the creek. "Flies blowing everywhere, [an] ungodly smell," Mr Walters told the court. "We hollered, 'Mother'. It scared me to death."

The memory of that day four decades ago was equally vivid in the mind of Mr Walters' sister, Sarah Delaughter. "It's hard to see," she said, as the court was shown a photograph of Mr White's fly-covered body. "It makes you remember."

The pair told the court that even as children they knew the forest was government land. "I ran [in] it when I was boy," said Mr Walters. "I hunted it, played, ran through the hollows and the woods." He said there was a sign that stated it was a national forest. He said it was "government land".

The prosecution also has the testimony of Mr Avants himself, given to an FBI agent investigating another crime after the 1967 trial. Retired federal agent Allan Kornblum told the court that Mr Avants had described shooting Mr White, who the defendant had referred to with a racial slur.

"Before I shot him, the other fella ... had shot him first with a carbine," Mr Kornblum said Mr Avants had told him. "Then I shot him. I blew his head off with a shotgun."

Mr Avants' lawyer, Tom Royals, has argued that prosecutors are relying on evidence from some investigators who died long ago.

As such, he told the racially mixed jury, they would be listening to lots of stories from the prosecution, but not necessarily true ones. "I remember telling my daughter stories and as she got older she would say 'Is it true dad?'," he told the jury. "I hope you all will ask whether it's true."

If convicted, Avants could be sentenced to death. But prosecutors have not said whether they would seek the death penalty.

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