America Versus the Continent
What gives between these two situations?Ex-Ku Klux Klan leader, 80, faces jail over killings
By Harry Mount in New York
(Filed: 22/06/2005)
One of the ugliest chapters of America's civil rights era was closed yesterday when a preacher and former Ku Klux Klan leader was found guilty of ordering the killings of three young activists 41 years to the day after their deaths.
Edgar Ray Killen, 80, faces a minimum sentence of 20 years after he was convicted on three counts of manslaughter by a mainly white jury in the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi.
The jury decided that Killen had organised the killing of New Yorkers Michael Schwerner, 24, and Andrew Goodman, 20, and James Chaney, 21, from Mississippi.
Update: Killian receives 60 year sentence.
In America, there was an early miscarriage of justice and years later, Edgar Ray Killen, aged 80, is going to jail. Justice finally caught up to him.
Ten Nazis too old to be jailed for village massacre
From Richard Owen in Rome
TEN former Nazi officers were given life sentences in absentia yesterday for the massacre of 560 men, women and children in a Tuscan village in 1944.
But the men, all now in their eighties and living in Germany, will escape punishment because they are too old to be imprisoned and will not be extradited to Italy.
In Europe, apparently, 80 years old is too old to send Nazis, guilty of a massacre of 560 men, women and children, to prison. Like so many unprosecuted Nazis, they get to live out their remaining days in freedom.
What does "too old to be imprisoned" mean? This evidence against them only came to light 10 years ago.
European values, I guess, versus American ones. I know which I prefer.
posted by Alcibiades @ 9:43 AM
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