"A License to Kill"

It looked and sounded like a family reunion. To be sure, Tom Coleman was on trial for killing a Yankee civil rights worker. But no one gathered in the slave-built, whitewashed Lowndes County courthouse -- least of all the paunchy, gum-chewing defendant -- allowed that to interfere with the civilities. There, grinning across the court room, was Coleman's nephew, Robert Coleman Black, one of his defense attorneys. A defense witness was a first cousin. Mrs. Kelley Coleman, the court clerk, was a cousin by marriage. The defendant's own name even appeared on the list of potential jurors, causing quiet merriment when it was read aloud in court.

Also on hand was a sympathetic delegation from Alabama's Ku Klux Klan, There was 21-year-old Klansman Collie Leroy Wilkins, himself accused of murdering a civil rights worker, Detroit Housewife Viola Liuzzo; Wilkins, whose trial in the same courtroom ended in a hung jury, will return there for retrial this month. Near him sat Alabama Grand Dragon Robert Creel and a muscular, crew-cut man portentously identified as chief of the K.B.I.--the Klan Bureau of Investigation.

Coleman's friends and kinfolk had gathered in misty Hayneville (pop. 300 whites, 700 Negroes) for his trial on the charge of killing Jonathan M. Daniels, 26, an Episcopal seminarian from Keene, N.H. The victim and the Rev. Richard Morrisroe, 26, a Catholic priest from Chicago, had been among 28 persons arrested last Aug. 14 while picketing three stores in nearby Fort Deposit that allegedly discriminate against Negroes. Jailed in Hayneville, the workers were abruptly released without bond a week later, on the same day that their cases were transferred to federal court. Shortly afterward, in front of the red frame Cash Store two blocks from the courthouse, the two men of the cloth were felled by two shotgun blasts. Daniels died instantly; Morrisroe was critically wounded in the back.

Denied. Coleman, 55, an unpaid, part-time "special deputy," was indicted by a county grand jury for manslaughter, defined in Alabama as killing "intentionally but without malice." State Attorney General Richmond Flowers took over the prosecution, announced that he would seek a new indictment for murder. Last week, before Circuit Judge T. Werth Thagard, Flowers requested a postponement of the manslaughter trial. His main argument: the state's key witness, Morrisroe, was still hospitalized and too ill to testify. Thagard denied a postponement.

Next day, when the 60 veniremen--all white--were asked whether they had any fixed opinion on the case, one blurted: "I have. Not guilty." Amid snickers from white spectators, the state objected that such a remark in open court prejudiced a fair trial; but again a continuance was denied. The state then asked permission to withdraw the case until it was prepared to prosecute.

Whereupon Thagard ordered the attorney general's office to withdraw from the case, directed two local officials, Circuit Solicitor Arthur Gamble Jr. and County Solicitor Carlton Perdue, to handle the prosecution--even though Alabama law clearly empowers the attorney general "to direct the prosecution of any criminal case in any of the courts of this state."

In the Mouth. After that the trial proceeded with alacrity. An all-white jury was impaneled in 40 minutes. And the defense version soon became clear: the priest and the seminarian were dangerous radicals who had attempted an armed assault on a store in which there were white women. The first witness, a chunky deputy sheriff, testified that when Daniels got out of jail he was met "by a nigger girl."

Q.: What did he do that attracted your attention?

A..: He kissed that nigger girl.

Q.: He kiss her on the cheek or mouth?

A.: In the mouth.

As further discrediting evidence, the defense introduced a paperback book found on Daniels' body, Meyer Levin's The Fanatic. And as a clincher, Defense Attorney Vaughan Hill Robison waved the dead seminarian's maroon undershorts in the courtroom: they looked red and, he said, "smell of urine." The operator of the Cash Store, handsome, fortyish Mrs. Virginia Varner, was called; the defense brought out that there is a beauty shop in the back of the store and, as Robison put it, "The operators there are womenfolk just like yourself."

Dime in Hand. The prosecution's white witnesses all sounded as if they were testifying for the defense. Leon Crocker, a domino-playing friend of Coleman's, testified that he was sitting on a bench in front of the store. He said that he heard Coleman tell Daniels that the store was closed, but that Daniels opened the door anyway--and "I heard a shot." Morrisroe, Crocker said, "made a break like he was going for the door.". Crocker solemnly avowed that in Daniels' right hand "there was a bright, shiny object that resembled a knife," while Father Morrisroe had something in his right hand that he "took to be a pistol. I saw a round object like a gun barrel." Two defense witnesses, a county construction employee and a stockyard worker, added that they later saw two Negroes leaning over the bleeding bodies "pickin' up a knife" and "sumpin' . . . looked like a pistol"--neatly explaining why no weapons were found on the victims.

Five Negro youths testified that, on the contrary, Daniels and Morrisroe were both unarmed. In a statement from his hospital bed in Chicago, Morrisroe said: "When Daniels reached the front of the store, a man announced from inside that the store was closed and demanded that we leave. Daniels asked that man if he were threatening us. He answered in effect, 'You damn right I am.' . . .I was about ten feet in back of Daniels. Almost instantly after the statement was made, one shot was fired. When Daniels was shot, I turned to leave. I did not want to play hero. Another shot was fired, and I was struck . . . in my spine." The priest said that neither he nor Daniels was armed--"The only thing I had in my hand was a dime," for a soft drink.

"Outrage." Nevertheless, Prosecutor Gamble in his summation twice referred to "that knife." Assistant Prosecutor Perdue spoke of Daniels' "attempting to force his way in" and to Morrisroe's "coming forward behind Mr. Daniels." Thus, while arguing unconvincingly for conviction, the prosecution blandly conceded the defense's two vital arguments: that the victims 1) had weapons, and 2) were advancing on Coleman.

At one point, a juror gave the accused a broad wink. It was a good tipoff. After 1 hr. 29 min. of deliberation, the jury reached its verdict: "Not guilty." Not that anyone had expected differently in "bloody Lowndes," as Negroes call the county. Nonetheless, Attorney General Flowers, a courageous, outspoken antisegregationist whose own life was threatened during the trial, denounced the verdict as an outrage. Said he: "Now those who feel they have a license to kill, maim and destroy have been issued that license."

From a federal court in Montgomery at week's end came a final, Sophoclean footnote to the tragedy. Ruling that civil rights workers' original arrests in Fort Deposit were illegal, Judge Frank M. Johnson held that they had simply been exercising their right of peaceful assembly. Thus, Jon Daniels' life might never have been lost if his own civil rights had not been violated in the first place.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.