The year is 1964. You are a nice Jewish man from New York City going to help the Congress on Racial Equality in the south by registering African-Americans to vote in Meridian, Miss. Your name is Michael Schwerner, and you are accompanied by Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, whom you had met training for the cause. You are all Civil Rights activists. When you get to Mississippi, however, you are not welcomed. The locals think you are an agitator, and the local sheriff, who was conspiring with the Ku Klux Klan, arrests you. He alerts his fellow Klansmen that you are soon to be released. They follow you out of prison, track you down and kill you, burying your body in the night.

After a few days without contact, your family begins to worry. They call their local officials, and the government sends FBI agents and sailors from the Navy to search for you. Eventually, your body and the bodies of your friends are found, prompting a search for the men responsible. The United States v. Cecil Price case that follows convicts many of the men involved, sending them to prison. A few are found innocent, but one man, Edgar Ray Killen, is acquitted because the jury ends up deadlocked on the grounds that they cannot find sufficient evidence against him. Despite the fact that Killen is believed to have been one of the masterminds behind your killing, he is set free.

Fast forward to today. Killen is now in jail. He is sickly and in his 80s. He was retried in 2005 and, though tried for murder, was found guilty of manslaughter for a death arising from a related kidnapping case. However, it was an unfair trial. The court presented no new evidence against him and the judge was predetermined to convict him. Not to mention, much of the original evidence had been obtained illegally through a mafia hitman deployed by the government in the 1960s. Killen, although a man almost guaranteed to have broken the law, was essentially stripped of his rights and went to jail unfairly and unconstitutionally.

Enter Barrett Weinberger, a Jewish attorney from Ohio who provides legal consulting in constitutional and post-conviction matters nationwide. Weinberger has signed on to help with Killen’s post-conviction petition.

When Weinberger’s colleague Robert Ratliff presented the case to him, he seemed unsure how Weinberger would react. “He had a lot more misgivings about it than I did,” Ratliff says. Weinberger recalls worrying about Ratliff’s tone and thinking they might be doing something wrong. “Either we’re doing something we shouldn’t do, or the victims were Jewish,” Weinberger says.

Of course, two of the victims were Jewish, and the man who Weinberger would be defending was an obvious anti-Semite. “My first reaction was: ‘Rob, take the case if you want, I’m not touching it,’” Weinberger says. But after reflecting on it, he realized he was professionally obligated to help this man and defend his rights. So Weinberger took the case. He wrote a letter to the families explaining that Killen deserved his rights, no matter the circumstances.

Weinberger has never discussed his religion with Killen, believing that openly conversing about his Judaism with his client would only further complicate an already complex issue. But Weinberger says his religion was a huge factor in determining whether or not to take the case, and in the end, it came down to an issue of morality. “The aspect of pursuing justice just trumped everything,” he says.

Ratliff agrees that Weinberger’s religion was a key element to this case. “His religious background provided me with a great deal of insight on how we want to approach some of the things in this case,” Ratliff says. “Barry’s background has helped us maintain the focus on the legal issues.”

While Goodman and Schwerner were Jewish and were killed for working with the Civil Rights Movement, Weinberger does not believe that is a reason to deprive one person of his constitutionally-guaranteed rights. “If we do not have a judicial system that can protect our rights, none of it matters,” he says. If Weinberger and Ratliff win the case, Killen will be released from jail. He will be retried, but not with the same evidence that caused his prior conviction. Weinberger said he will not regret the decision to take the case if Killen were released because he believes it is morally just.

“I would not feel comfortable as a professional if I had an opportunity to correct something like this and I just walked away,” he says. “If I looked at myself in the mirror when it’s all over and [Killen is] home with his wife, bragging to his friends how he was able to get out of jail, what I’m hoping to see in myself is someone who was able to get people to recognize that they were wrong.”

zachary WICHTER