Murdered a man in 1965, pleads guilty now

James Bonard Fowler is 76 now, but in 1965 he was a juvenile Alabama state trooper facing the rising wave of the civil rights movement.

On Monday, at the Perry County Courthouse in Alabama, that past came calling: Mr. Fowler, who is white, pleaded guilty to the 1965 killing of a black man whose loss led to the historic civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery.

Mr. Fowler will face six months in prison for the deadly shooting of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old civil rights marcher who died after an argument with the police in Marion, Ala. His death inspired the first of the famous Selma marches the next month, an event that also ended in violence.

In the courthouse Monday, with Mr. Jackson's family watching, Mr. Fowler apologized for the shooting and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor manslaughter, but insisted that he had acted in self-defense, believing that Mr. Jackson was trying to grab his gun.

"I was coming over here to save lives," he said. "I didn't mean to take lives. I wish I could redo it."

The plea agreement brought to an end a case that had crept through the justice system for decades. In the 1960s, two grand juries investigated the killing but chose to not pursue charges. Then in 2004, Mr. Fowler confessed to a reporter for The Anniston Star that he had fired the gun.