"Atrocious & Diabolical"

Up before an all-white male jury in Circuit Judge Alta L. King's Birmingham courtroom last week: Bart A. Floyd, 31, second Ku Klux Klansman to stand trial for castrating a Negro in a deserted Alabama shack last September. The verdict: guilty of mayhem. The sentence, the same administered a fortnight earlier to one of Floyd's partners in crime: 20 years' imprisonment, the maximum sentence under Alabama law. "The sentence," said the Alabama-born Judge King, "is not nearly commensurate with the crime. You have disrupted the friendly relations between the races. You have drawn the attention of the entire world. This is the most cowardly, atrocious and diabolical crime ever to come to my attention."

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