Georgia: An Extreme Case

Inside the second-floor County courtroom in Danielsville, Ga. (pop. 362), the air was hot and humid. On the narrow balcony overlooking the courtroom a dozen Negroes silently watched the proceedings. Below, the seats in the whites-only section were jammed. All had come last week to see the murder trial of State of Georgia v. Joseph Howard Sims and Cecil William Myers.

Sims, 41, an Athens machinist, and Myers, 25, a yarn plucker at an Athens textile mill, were charged with the senseless shotgun slaying last July 11 of District of Columbia Educator Lemuel A. Penn, 49, who was driving home after a training stint as an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel at Fort Benning, Ga. A third defendant, Gas Station Attendant James S. Lackey, 28, had been granted a separate trial. All three are Ku Klux Klansmen.

A Chilling Story. For the better part of two days, Special State Prosecutor Jeff Wayne and Defense Attorney Jim Hudson argued about the admissibility of an eight-page, handwritten confession given to the FBI, and later repudiated, by Lackey. Finally, white-haired Judge William Carey Skelton ruled: “I’ll admit it.” Wayne, a tall, rangy Gainesville lawyer, cleared his throat and began to read Lackey’s chilling story.

“At some time between 4 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., we spotted a 1959 Chevy occupied by several colored men. We trailed the car and noticed the Washington, D.C. plates. I believe Mr. Sims said, ‘That must be some of President Johnson’s boys.’ I was driving, and I began following the car as directed by Myers, who was sitting alongside of me up front. Sims was sitting in the back. Sims told me to fall back and follow the Negroes, and I stayed back 100 to 200 yds. I asked the others what they were going to do, and Sims said, ‘I’m going to kill me a nigger.’ Both Sims and Myers told me to pass the car occupied by the Negroes from Washington. When I came alongside the Negroes’ car, both Myers and Sims fired shotguns into the Negroes’ car.”

Lackey had told how the three white men returned to an Athens garage operated by Herbert Guest, 37. Guest had been arrested with the others but a Madison County grand jury failed to return a murder indictment against him. Continued Lackey’s confession: “The double-barreled shotgun used by Cecil Myers was the shopgun usually hanging on the wall of Guest’s garage. The shotgun used by Sims is his own gun. As soon as we got back to Guest’s garage, both Myers and Sims cleaned the shotguns in the garage. They wiped the guns off with a rag. Guest asked what had happened, and Sims said, ‘We shot one, but don’t know if we killed him or not.’

“The original reason for our following the colored men was because we heard that Martin Luther King might make Georgia a testing ground for the civil rights bill. We thought some out-of-town niggers might stir up some trouble in Athens. We had intended scaring off any out-of-town colored people before they could give us any trouble. When the car from Washington was spotted on July 11, we thought they might be out-of-towners who might cause trouble.”

Short Defense. Later, when called to the witness stand, Garage Owner Guest took the Fifth Amendment 16 times. But he had already made a statement to the FBI, and it too was admitted into evidence by Judge Skelton. In it Guest told of overhearing a conversation between Sims and Myers the day after Penn’s killing: “I overheard one of them say that they thought the car they had shot had gone into the river,” said Guest. Next night, he said, “they told me that they were the ones that shot at the car in which Penn was killed.”

With that, the state rested. The defense took 1 hr. 40 min. to present its case, which consisted chiefly of unsworn testimony by both Sims and Myers that they were innocent. “I believe I was in Athens at the time,” said Sims. Parroted Myers: “I do believe I was in Athens at this time.” State Solicitor-General Clete Johnson demanded the death penalty, told the jury: “This is an extreme case and demands the extreme penalty. It was cold-blooded assassination.”

But Georgia juries are not in the habit of convicting white men for killing Negroes, and at week’s end, after deliberating for 3 hrs. 15 min., the allwhite, all-male jury found Klansmen Sims and Myers not guilty.