Return to Transcripts main page
American Morning
Blanton Found Guilty of Church Bombing
Aired May 02, 2001 - 11:12 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: In Birmingham, Alabama, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan faces four life sentences for a church bombing that happened nearly four decades ago. A jury yesterday found Thomas Blanton, Jr., guilty of murder in the deaths of four African-American girls. The victims were killed in the 1963 bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.
Prosecutors portrayed the 62-year-old Blanton as a man of hate. His attorney, though, says that his client will appeal.
Joining us now from Birmingham is Kevin Sack, a reporter for "The New York Times." He has covered the Blanton trial and has been checking in with us on a regular basis.
Kevin, good to have you on camera instead of just on the phone.
KEVIN SACK, "THE NEW YORK TIMES": Good morning.
KAGAN: Good morning. Good to see you.
SACK: How are you doing, Daryn?
KAGAN: This one came back very quickly. Were you surprised, one, by the verdict and, two, by how quickly it came back?
SACK: Well, I think you could have knocked everybody in the courtroom over with a feather when the jury came back after just a little over two hours. Nobody expected that. In fact, many of us thought when the -- when the judge summoned us into court that he was going to tell us that the jury was going home for the night.
And I think there was -- there was a certain amount of surprise about the verdict, too, particularly given the speed. This was a very difficult circumstantial case to make, and the prosecution deserves a lot of credit for convincing this jury. I mean, they were never able to tell this jury exactly what Blanton's role was, how the bomb was made, what it was made of, who transported it, who built it, where it was built. All that detail...
KAGAN: And yet they got a conviction.
SACK: ... is unknown.
KAGAN: And yet... SACK: And yet they got a conviction.
KAGAN: ... needing all that, they got a conviction. It would seem the turning point...
SACK: That's right.
KAGAN: ... would be these tapes. What were on those tapes?
SACK: The tapes were -- the tapes were absolutely the -- the critical pieces of evidence in this case, and there were two sets of tapes, both of which reinforced each other.
One was a tape recording made with an FBI bug planted in Blanton's apartment about a year after the bombing, and it caught a conversation between him and his wife in which he refers repeatedly to the bomb and making the bomb, although he doesn't provide a lot of detail about it. He just -- he says that he was at a meeting where they talked about making the bomb.
The second set of tapes came from a recording in the -- a recorder in the trunk of Mitchell Burns' car. Mitchell Burns was a friend of Blanton's, who became an FBI informer, and they rode around night after night after night for a couple of years after the bombing talking about it, and he also made, again, some sort of vague references to the bombing and to -- to the church bombing itself on that tape.
And, together, they convinced the jury that this man did, in fact, have some sort of knowledge about what happened.
KAGAN: Now Blanton's attorney, of course, not very happy that these tapes were played, says they should never have been admissible in the first place. He's going to appeal on that basis, also on the idea that this trial should never have taken place in Birmingham.
SACK: That's right. Those will be definitely two issues for appeal.
And the third issue for appeal almost certainly will be the makeup of the jury. The jury had 11 women and one man, and the only man was a black man. So there were no white men on the jury. Blanton, of course, is a white man. And his attorney, John Robbins, presumably will argue that, therefore, the jury did not accurately -- was not a jury of Blanton's peers.
KAGAN: Four suspects originally in this case going back to 1963. One of them convicted and died in prison. One never charged. Frank -- Bobby Frank -- one never charged, and he died. And then there's Bobby Frank Cherry, who's still out and who has been ruled incompetent. Any chance that he will also be brought to trial at some point?
SACK: Well, there's still a chance, although I think most people watching this case would say that it's on the slim side.
KAGAN: Why is that?
SACK: He was ruled -- he was ruled incompetent to stand trial by this judge about two weeks ago. There was a psychiatric evaluation that determined that he suffered from vascular dementia, that he could not assist in his own defense. The prosecution has asked for another psychiatric evaluation to try to challenge the first one.
But I think there's a sense that -- that the first finding may be accurate and that it will be very difficult to get him back in court. That being said, the indictment still stands, and if this evaluation does come back differently, they can still try him.
KAGAN: Thirty-eight years later, what will be the legacy of these four little girls that lost lives and also of the case in general?
SACK: Well, I guess the optimist would say that the legacy is that -- that times have changed, and you can -- by charting the progress in this case, meaning first the utter failure to prosecute anybody for decades and then watching this town and watching southern society in general change, change to the extent where you could bring a case, you could get a jury that had blacks on it, you could get a jury in Birmingham, Alabama, where whites would not automatically side with the segregationists, that that does demonstrate the way things have changed down here. I know the city certainly hopes that that's the message that goes out across the world.
KAGAN: Kevin Sack, appreciate your coverage throughout this trial from Birmingham. Thanks so much.
SACK: Thanks for having me, Daryn.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
