Supreme Court struck down capital punishment. He said the capital murder statute on the books in 1963 could not be used because it was replaced in the mid-1970s after the U.S. Jones said the evidence lent itself better to state charges than to federal ones. One count was for intentional murder and the other involved "universal malice" because the bomb was placed where it could have killed any number of people. "He wants the world to know his story, and he thinks he'll be vindicated," said Johnson.īlanton and Cherry were charged with eight counts of murder each - two counts covering each of the four slain girls. Mickey Johnson, Cherry's lawyer, said his client is in ill health. "No one should stop until the people who are responsible are brought to justice," Attorney General Janet Reno said in Washington.īlanton and Cherry for years have denied any role in the Birmingham bombing. Bowers, 73, was found guilty in the 1966 firebomb death of Mississippi civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer. In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted in the 1963 assassination in Jackson, Miss., of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers. The indictment marked the latest in a series of 1960s racial crimes in the South that are being brought for prosecution decades later. 15, 1963, blast demolished an outside wall of the church and killed four girls who were in a basement restroom, preparing for a youth program: 11-year-old Denise McNair and three 14-year-olds, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins. The blast was one of the most horrific crimes of the civil rights era and came just months after police in Birmingham used dogs and firehoses to drive back black marchers. On Tuesday, Cherry's 47-year-old son, Thomas Frank Cherry, appeared before the special Jefferson County grand jury but said he couldn't discuss his appearance. But over the past year, estranged family members of Cherry have said publicly that he talked of helping plant the dynamite. Attorney Doug Jones would not say what led to the break in the case after 37 years. A fourth suspect, Herman Cash, was never charged he, too, is dead. Chambliss was convicted in 1977 and died in prison in 1985. Prosecutors have long suspected that Blanton and Cherry plotted with former Klansman Robert Edward Chambliss to bomb the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. If convicted, they could get life in prison with the possibility of parole. Blanton Jr., 61, of Birmingham, and Bobby Frank Cherry, 69, of Mabank, Texas, surrendered on the state charges and were jailed without bail. Two former Ku Klux Klansmen were arrested on murder charges Wednesday in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls on a Sunday morning - a crime that shocked the nation and galvanized the civil rights movement. The event which killed four black girls energized the civil rights movementīIRMINGHAM, Ala. 1963 BIRMINGHAM CHURCH BOMBING: Former Klansmen arrested
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