Nation: Cooler for Collie

A year before he was arrested for the nightrider slaying of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo near Selma last March, Alabama Klansman Collie Leroy Wilkins was riding around with a sawed-off shotgun in his car. Stopped by the cops in Hueytown, near Birmingham, Wilkins pleaded guilty to violating a 1934 federal law designed to curb gangsters, which requires registration of such weapons. After a not-too-inquiring probation officer reported that he had a blameless character and Birmingham Federal Judge Clarence Allgood himself decided that Collie’s mother “is a real good woman,”

Wilkins was let off with a hand-smacking: a suspended sentence and two years’ probation, conditioned on his promise not to leave Allgood’s judicial district in that time without specific permission from the parole officer.

Selma is not in that district. So after two Alabama juries had failed to convict Wilkins, 22, on murder charges, and a federal court had found him guilty of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of civil rights workers in the Liuzzo slaying,* Judge Allgood last week sentenced Wilkins to a year and a day in prison, his original term on the firearms charge.

*Two fellow Klansmen convicted with Wilkins in the civil rights case, Eugene Thomas, 42, and William Orville Eaton, 41, also face trial for murder in Mrs. Liuzzo’s slaying. Thomas is under indictment as well for violating the federal firearms law.