“The former USA attorney who convicted him, Doug Jones, is betting the 86-year-old Blanton dies behind prison walls”.
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The Alabama parole board’s decision to deny parole after Blanton’s first 15 years in jail was applauded by representatives from the NAACP who attended the hearing, NBC News reported.
Ahead of the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles Wednesday morning meeting to consider parole for the last living 16th Street Baptist Church bomber, Birmingham Mayor William Bell has issued a statement.
Opponents are speaking out against Blanton’s possible release after just 15 years in prison. Each of them wore yellow lanyards that read “No Parole for Thomas Blanton”.
The board rejected parole for Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., 78, who has served 15 years of a life term for being part of a group of Klansmen who planted a bomb outside Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church during the civil rights movement. Blanton and Cherry both were convicted; Cash died before being charged.
Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley convicted the then-73-year-old Chambliss in 1977, after reopening the case in 1971, and then the case remained dormant for decades.
Black leaders in the U.S. have opposed his release, and members of the victims’ families spoke at the hearing to argue that he should stay behind bars.
“It is appalling. It is shocking. It is very sorrowful and it’s very upsetting to not only me and my family, but this nation”, said Dianne Robertson Braddock, sister of Carole Robertson, in reference to the letter she received alerting her to Blanton’s request for parole. “My parents never recovered from the loss of their youngest child”. Nearly 30 years after the bombing, Blanton was sentenced to life imprisonment for planting a bomb outside the church during the height of the civil rights movement. A jury of four African-Americans and eight whites indicted the former Klansman on four counts of first-degree murder, almost four decades after the tragedy, Atlanta Black Star reports. The inmate won’t be in attendance during the hearing. No one showed up on behalf of the former Klansman either.
He is serving four back-to-back life sentences for his crime at the St. Clair Correctional Facility, and has reportedly not accepted responsibility or expressed remorse for the bombing, but sought to be released to die as a free man.
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“Because he has never shown any remorse whatsoever for taking the lives of those innocent little girls, justice can only be served if Thomas Blanton spends the rest of his life in prison”, unusual continued.
