The jury returned on a Friday. Byron De La Beckwith, aged 73, stood for the verdict. The charge was murder. The victim was Medgar Evers, shot in the back in his own driveway on June 12, 1963. Two previous trials in the 1960s had ended with hung juries. This was the third.
The state’s case was built on old evidence seen anew. The murder weapon, a 1917 Enfield rifle, traced definitively to Beckwith. His fingerprint on its scope. New testimony from witnesses who recounted his boasts about the killing, statements he had made with the impunity of a man who believed time had granted him immunity. The defense argued the evidence was stale, the witnesses unreliable. They painted Beckwith as a victim of political persecution.
The jury deliberated for seven hours. When the foreman spoke the word “guilty,” there was no outburst in the Jackson courtroom. Myrlie Evers-Widows, Medgar’s widow, who had waited three decades, closed her eyes. Beckwith showed no reaction. The judge sentenced him to life in prison. The event was a procedural correction, a belated alignment of the legal record with the factual one. It did not heal the wound of 1963. It did not alter the history of those two earlier trials. It simply stated, with the measured force of law, what had always been true.