The murder of Medgar Evers

The physical case was made within days of the murder and then sat for twenty-five years. Police found the rifle in bushes near a drive-in across from the Evers home, and an FBI examiner testified that a latent print on its telescopic sight was Beckwith's; witnesses said he had bought the scope in May 1963 and been given the rifle in a trade years earlier. Two Hinds County juries, all white and all male, deadlocked in February and April 1964, and on March 10, 1969 the state entered a nolle prosequi and the indictment died. What reopened it was a newspaper story. In 1989 Jerry Mitchell of The Clarion-Ledger, working from leaked and misfiled records of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state agency created to defend segregation, reported on October 1 that the commission had secretly helped Beckwith's defense during the 1964 trials, including gathering information on prospective jurors. The next day Evers' widow called for the case to be reopened. Assistant district attorney Bobby DeLaughter and district attorney Ed Peters took it on with no file, no transcript and no evidence in hand. The team located crime-scene negatives and a copy of the 1964 record, and, as the Mississippi Supreme Court later summarised it, found that Beckwith had confessed to at least five people over the years, among them a former FBI informant inside the Klan, an acquaintance who heard him joke about it in a restaurant in 1966, a woman who drove him to Parchman and a former guard at Angola prison. Mitchell also found that the two Greenwood officers who had given Beckwith a 1:05 a.m. alibi ninety miles away could not hold to their story; prosecutors questioned them before a grand jury in December 1990, and the grand jury indicted. Beckwith was arrested in Tennessee and extradited, the state Supreme Court voted 4 to 3 in December 1992 to let the trial proceed, and in 1994 the old evidence and the new witnesses were put to a jury that convicted him. The method was not forensic: leaked state files gave a reason to reopen the case, and witnesses were finally willing to repeat what Beckwith had told them.