Cecil Price - Trial and Aftermath

Trial and Aftermath

Following the discovery of the bodies the state of Mississippi refused to bring murder charges against anyone. However, in January 1965, Price and seventeen others were indicted with conspiring in a Ku Klux Klan plot to murder three young civil rights workers. The indictments were dismissed by District Court but the decision was later reversed on appeal and the charges reinstated. The trial of Price and the other defendants began on October 7, 1967 as United States v. Cecil Price, et al.. During this time Price declared himself a candidate for sheriff and he lost the election to Hop Barnette who was one of his co-defendants.

On October 21, 1967, Price was found guilty at trial and sentenced by Judge Cox to a six-year prison term. He served four and a half years at the Sandstone Federal Penitentiary in Minnesota. Following his release in 1974, Price returned to Philadelphia where he worked as a surveyor, oil company driver, and as a watchmaker in a jewelry shop. He was never charged with the murders of the three men.

Later in life Price refused to speak publicly about the events of 1964 to 1967. During an interview for the New York Times Magazine in 1977, he stated that "he enjoyed watching the television show Roots". In the same article Price said "We've got to accept this is the way things are going to be and that's it."

Price died on May 6, 2001, three days after falling from a lift in an equipment rental store in Philadelphia, Mississippi. He died in the same hospital in Jackson where, thirty-seven years earlier, he had helped transport the bodies of the three slain civil rights workers for autopsies.

At the time of Price's death, Mississippi attorney general Mike Moore and Neshoba County prosecutor Ken Turner were considering bringing state murder charges against some of the surviving defendants in the 1967 federal trial. Attorney General Moore saw Price's death as harmful to the ongoing investigation: "If he had been a defendant, he would have been a principal defendant. If he had been a witness, he would have been our best witness. Either way, his death is a tragic blow to our case."