Word: conviction
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Bowers was tried twice by the state in the 1960s for Dahmer's murder, but by votes of 11 to 1 and 10 to 2 to convict, juries failed to reach the unanimous verdict required to send him to jail. A federal trial also ended in deadlock. Prosecutors say they suspected witness tampering by the Klan but couldn't prove it. Bowers, now 73, is a free man living in Laurel, just 30 miles up the interstate from the Dahmer family...
Perhaps most important, the chief witness against Bowers in his earlier trials, who disappeared in 1971, was located and arrested in February. Billy Roy Pitts, one of the Klansmen who attacked the Dahmer house, was convicted on federal conspiracy charges. He served four years, but through circumstances that have never been fully explained, he was not sent back to Mississippi to serve his life sentence for murder. Pitts, who had been living in Denham Springs, La., has agreed to testify against Bowers one more time. Pitts has told of a Klan meeting at which Bowers ordered Dahmer killed. Pitts...
...jury untainted by Klan influence. Three jurors from Bowers' 1968 trial said afterward that during deliberations, all the jurors agreed that he was guilty, yet one kept voting "not guilty" in the secret ballots that decide the verdict. But jurors today seem far less afraid to convict Klan defendants. According to documents quoted by the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, an informant recently told investigators that Bowers has said he is worried about losing this time "because he didn't have the contacts he once had, that a lot of them had died...
Still, Arrington worries that prosecutors will persuade several Klansmen to testify against Bowers. He fears the changes in state politics that, he says, are driving Moore and Lindsey to work so hard to convict Bowers. "Since the blacks are voting now, that has given them a boost," Arrington says. "I was district attorney before they could vote...
...Whitewater investigation that actually deals with Whitewater, the key witness is David Hale. Hale says that in 1986, when he headed a small lending operation, Bill Clinton pressured him to make an illegal loan to Susan McDougal, a partner of the Clintons in Whitewater. Testimony by Hale helped convict McDougal, her ex-husband James and former Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker, Starr's biggest prizes to date. All the same, Hale is not the ideal keystone for a case against the President. Not when Hale has pleaded guilty to fraud. And not when he started implicating Clinton only after federal...