Thomas E. Blanton Trial (Alabama Church Bombing): 2001

Within a few weeks investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had identified four members of local Ku Klux Klan groups as suspects. They were Robert Chambliss, known as "Dynamite Bob," and thought to be the ringleader, Thomas E. Blanton, Herman Cash, and Bobby Frank Cherry. Using electronic surveillance and assisted by a Klan member, Mitchell Burns, who had become a paid informant, the FBI gathered taped recordings of conversations among these men and their friends and families which implicated them in the bombing, and which would eventually provide the evidence crucial for the convictions. However, ignoring the express wishes of President John F. Kennedy, and subsequently President Lyndon B. Johnson, then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover overrode his agents in the field and ordered that they not proceed with prosecutions, ostensibly on the grounds that the case was circumstantial, and it would not be possible to convict white men of killing blacks in Birmingham at the time. Hoover also ordered the records of the investigation to be sealed.

In the mid-1970s, Alabama attorney general Bill Baxley was able to obtain FBI records pertaining to Robert Chambliss, and in 1977 Chambliss was convicted of murder in the bombing; he died in prison in 1985. Herman Cash died in 1994; he was never charged in the case. In 1993 Birmingham civic leaders persuaded the FBI to re-open the case, which resulted in the production of 9,000 tapes and documents collected by the FBI in the 1960s, only a portion of which had been seen by prosecutors in the Chambliss trial. Several other successful prosecutions in the 1990s for acts committed against blacks and civil rights leaders decades earlier encouraged Birmingham leaders to press the case against Blanton and Cherry. These included the conviction in 1994 of Byron De La Beckwith for the assassination of Medgar Evers in 1963, and the conviction of former Klan imperial wizard Sam Bowers (see Price and Bowers trial) for the firebomb death of an NAACP leader in Mississippi in 1966. In May 2000 a Birmingham grand jury indicted Blanton and Cherry for the murder of the four girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church.

Blanton and Cherry were scheduled to be tried together, but two weeks before the trial was set to begin Circuit Court judge James Garrett postponed the trial of Cherry indefinitely, following a psychiatric finding that he was not mentally competent to assist in his own defense. Jury selection began on April 15, 2001, and took a week. The panel chosen from an unusually large pool consisted of eight white women, two white men, three black women, and three black men. The prosecution faced, by its own acknowledgement, a difficult task, made so largely by the number of years that had elapsed since the bombing. One key witness who had earlier testified to seeing a car resembling Blanton's Chevrolet near the church in the early hours of the morning of the bombing had died. Another witness who had testified to the grand jury that he had seen a man resembling Blanton carrying a black bag near the stairwell of the church at 1 A.M. on the morning of the blast had since suffered a stroke and was unable to give evidence. There was no physical evidence linking Blanton to the manufacture, transportation, or detonation of the bomb.