A prosecutor Monday urged an all-white jury to convict a former Ku Klux Klansman of murder for providing the rope used to hang the body of a young black man from a tree after a Klan slaying.
"He had been murdered for a horribly simple reason - he was black," said District Attorney Chris Galanos.Galanos' statement came in opening statements in the murder trial of Benjamin Franklin Cox, 27. He is accused of being an accomplice in the 1981 beating and strangulation death of Michael Donald, a 19-year-old black who was picked at random for abduction and killed. Donald's body was strung up in a tree.
Attorneys for Cox, a truck driver, struck all 21 blacks among the 60 prospective jurors Monday.
Two other Klansmen already are serving prison sentences in the slaying as a result of an FBI investigation that led to the first arrests in 1983.
The killing led to a $7 million jury verdict in 1987 against the United Klans of America, the nation's biggest Klan organization. The victim's mother, Beulah Mae Donald, was awarded Klan property in Tuscaloosa. She died last year.
Galanos described a Klan meeting in Mobile two nights before the Donald killing, saying the white supremacist group discussed "killing a nigger." The district attorney apologized for the language but said it would reappear in the trial.
Defense attorney Neil Hanley urged the jury to judge Cox as an individual, not as a former member of the hooded empire. The lawyer said the state's entire case is "Klan, Klan, Klan."
The murder charge against Cox does not include the possibility of a death sentence.
Cox's brother-in-law, Henry Francis Hays, was convicted of capital murder in 1983 and sentenced to death. That conviction is on appeal. James "Tiger" Knowles pleaded guilty in federal court to violating Donald's civil rights. He was sentenced to life in prison in a plea bargain that required his testimony against Hays and Cox.