InkBlots

Convicted murderer Edgar Ray Killen will be back in a Neshoba County Courtroom today, a little more than a year after he was sent to prison for the 1964 death of three civil rights workers in a long-delayed trial that garnered national attention. He’s trying to get a judge to release him, claiming failing health. It’s a pitch he used successfully to free himself from jail during the trial and one that was ultimately revealed as a hoax.

Retired Neshoba Democrat editor Stanley Dearman says freeing Killen now would undo the long-sought justice that was finally carried out by a local jury last year.

Papers are weighing in, too. The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal editorialized Thursday that Judge Marcus Gordon should keep Killen jailed. Clarion-Ledger columnist Eric Stringfellow says the convicted killer should die in prison. And this treatise by Gary Pettus.

The life of confessed murder Bobby Glen Wilcher was spared Tuesday when the Supreme Court decided 24 years wasn’t quite long enough to make up its mind whether they need to review his case or not. Wilcher, who couldn’t be consoled after he missed his date with destiny, was taken back to his cell and put under suicide watch and prescribed counseling. Does anyone else see the irony of that predicament?

Anyway, Clarion-Ledger Prespective Editor Sid Salter, one member of the media who’d been scheduled to witness the execution, blogs about the delay (which could take months), his support for the death penalty and being told by Wilcher himself the murderer would kill again if given the chance.

Salter colleague David Hampton, editorial director at the C-L, opposes capital punishment and blogs that Tuesday’s delay is another example of a bad system not working.

Back in the 80s, while Wilcher was on trial for the murders, Salter was in the early stages of his tenure as editor and publisher of The Scott County Times. The case is being covered these days for the SCT by longtime Mississippi newspaper reporter Chris Allen Baker, who before Tuesday’s stay reflected on the significance of the case some parallels to another horrific event that still awaits final justice in Montgomery County.

Meanwhile, other papers are beginning to weigh in on the stay. The Natchez Democrat doesn’t delay in putting a period on the sentence: Wilcher should be dead by now.

Brian Bloom has been named publisher of the DeSoto Times Today in Hernando, succeeding interim publisher Cindi Pittman. Bloom, 49, is a third-generation newspaperman, who started to learn the newspaper trade from his father beginning at the age of 6.

NOTE: The DTT link was not working earlier, but Bloom’s appointment was also announced by AP, via The Sun Herald.

The Madison County Journal has taken note of the stink stirred up by The Clarion-Ledger’s central MS Distribution Network. The issue surfaced nationally in a recent edition of Editor and Publisher.

“The Jackson Free Press claims that the daily (owned by Gannett, the largest newspaper company in the United States) is using underhanded techniques to either force free papers to hand over more cash for distribution costs, or see their individual boxes and racks get forced out of commercial spaces.”

Meanwhile, the Free Press cries chicken over the fact the C-L won’t openly discuss its plans for TDN.

In an unrelated story in this week’s Madison County Journal, it seems the City of Madison (or Madison…The City!) has ordered a few of the paper’s racks removed from area locations. We can’t find a link on the Website, but the tussle is mentioned in passing in the Journal’s story on the distribution network…

“The Madison County Journal is not involved in the Gannett dispute because at least so far it does not involve coin-operated racks, although the city of Madison this week ordered several Journal racks removed, see story page A5.”

Mike McQueen, a former managing editor of The Macon (Ga.) Telegraph, has been named chief of bureau for The Associated Press in New Orleans. In the job which he took over late last month, McQueen will oversee AP coverage in both Louisiana and Mississippi after the two states were lumped together in an AP reorganization a couple of years ago. McQueen, who attended the MPA convention in Biloxi last month with his predecessor, Hank Ackerman, has already brought on board a new news editor in Louisiana.

In commenting on McQueen’s appoitnment, the Maynard Institute’s Richard Prince notes in his blog that only four African Americans have held the post of bureau chief thus far with AP.

Meanwhile, the amiable Ackerman, who was serving his second tour in New Orleans, is rejoining the AP suits in New York. Ackerman’s latest stint was to oversee transition at the bureau. He previously served as bureau chief in the late 80s.

Clarion-Ledger Perspective Editor Sid Salter, Scott County Times reporter Chris Allen Baker and AP correpsondent Jack Elliott Jr. are print journalists scheduled to witness the execution of confessed murderer Bobby Glen Wilcher Tuesday afternoon at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility.

Salter, for one, makes no bones about supporting the death penalty.

Ten months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Bruce, MS native and Sun Herald employee Karen Shook of Long Beach maintains hope of eventually moving back into her home and out of the FEMA camper parked in her driveway. Her hometown paper, the Calhoun County Journal, recently profiled Shook and the new normality of her daily routine.

Meanwhile, The Journal News in White Plains, NY, features a local couple who trekked to the Gulf Coast to do things that people who have been volunteering during recovery do: Dad scraped away mold. Mom removed debris. And the girls — 15 and 16 — took care of children at the local Boys and Girls Club.

Mississippi Press columnist Reba McMellon reviews Sun Herald photographer Tim Isbell’s new book: “Vicksburg: Sentinels of Stone”…

Isbell’s photographs of statues and monuments in beautiful light make them come alive, perhaps more than if one were to see them in person. The photographs are accompanied by a text that explores the stories of the soldiers and citizens who participated in these devastating battles. These summaries serve to bring special meaning to the photographs. These sister books have flow that evokes both emotion and curiosity.

Star-Herald editor and publisher Mark Thornton is putting the gloves back on in Kosciusko. He’s finished taking people to task. He promises. No, really. He he means it.

The weekly Hattiesburg Independent announced this week it was ceasing publication and changing into a new regional magazine to debut later this summer.