TODAY'S NEWS NJ

Forty-five years after he was killed by an Alabama State Trooper Jimmie Lee Jackson (pictured above), whose death lead to the first civil rights march on Selma, is finally getting a small measure of justice.

James Bonard Fowler (pictured right), 77, the former state trooper in question, pled guilty to shooting Jackson and will serve six months in prison. He also apologized for his actions but still claimed the shooting was in self-defense:

"I was coming over here to save lives," said Fowler. "I didn't mean to take lives. I wish I could redo it."



It is the conclusion of a court case that has lingered since the 1960s, but the conclusion still seems to not value Jackson's life.

Albert Turner Jr., Perry County commissioner, called the verdict "a slap in the face of the people of this county."
I understand District Attorney Michael Jackson's reasoning as to why he accepted Fowler's plea of misdemeanor manslaughter:

"Time was starting to run out," Mr. Jackson said. "We wanted to make sure justice was done before he died."

Fowler is 77 and allowing the case to drag out longer will not benefit anyone.

Fowler finally confessed to an Anniston Star newspaper reporter in 2004, saying he fired the gun:

"Jimmie Lee Jackson was not murdered," he said in the interview. "He was trying to kill me, and I have no doubt in my mind that under the emotional situation at the time, that if he would have gotten complete control of my pistol, that he would have killed me or shot me. That's why my conscience is clear."

If that is the case, Fowler should have stepped up years ago to handle this situation. Why did he not make that admission in the 1970s, the 1980s or the 1990s? If he truly felt he did nothing wrong, he would have stepped up and defended himself long ago.

Jackson's family says he was unarmed and killed while trying to protect his mother (pictured above is Jackson's daughter, Cordelia Billingsley.)

These are the vestiges of our country's ugly past that still reverberate today.

But the bright side is that this marks the 24th "unpunished civil rights–era killings that have been reprosecuted since 1994, when a Mississippi jury convicted Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers in Jackson.The conviction also marks the first time that someone serving in law enforcement at the time of the crime has been convicted in these unpunished cases," the AP reports.

"Any conviction in these kinds of cases is significant," former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones of Birmingham, who successfully prosecuted two former Klansmen in 2001 and 2002 for their involvement in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls, told the AP.

Jimmie Lee Jackson's family can also take solace that his death was not in vain. The protests and movement that it helped to spark has changed the world.

I think the reason this verdict may be so unsatisfying to many is that the full truth about the way blacks were treated in the South has never been exposed. So many people's murders remain unsolved.

John Fleming, the Anniston Star reporter to whom Mr. Fowler confessed, told the New York Times that Fowler's admission was similiar to what may have happened in a truth and reconciliation commission:

"One thing we've never experienced in the South is anything close to a truth and reconciliation commission," he said. "What happened today was a moment of that experience."

Maybe this country still needs a truth and reconciliation commission.

By Jeff Mays