There’s an old saying, “Justice delayed is justice denied.” But in the case of three civil rights workers slain in Mississippi four decades ago, some say time may be on justice’s side.

Reputed Ku Klux Klan member Edgar Ray Killen, 79, was indicted this week on three counts of murder in the 1964 killings. But if Killen had been tried in Neshoba County, Miss., four decades ago, an all-white jury likely would have acquitted him or convicted him of a lesser charge, lawyers say.

“And that would have prevented these guys from being tried today,” said civil rights attorney Morris Dees, whose Southern Poverty Law Center has dogged the Klan in the courts.

Now, Killen – and anyone else who might be charged in the infamous case – will have to face a racially diverse jury in a courtroom where not only the defendants, but the social system that spawned these crimes will be put on trial.

“Perhaps we’re lucky it took this long,” said Julian Bond, board chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Killen, his head slightly tilted, uttered a strong “not guilty” three times to three murder charges Friday. Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood and District Attorney Mark Duncan would not discuss what evidence they developed in the case, which galvanized public opinion in 1964 and was dramatized in the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.”

But Killen’s name has been associated with the case from the beginning. FBI records and witnesses from a 1960s federal trial in the case indicated that the preacher organized the carloads of Klansmen who followed the civil rights workers out of town and waylaid them on the night of the killings.

James Chaney, a 21-year-old black Mississippian, and two white New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, were stopped by Klansmen, beaten and shot to death. Their bodies were found 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam.

Recognizing the unlikely event of a successful state murder prosecution, the U.S. Justice Department stepped in to investigate. Nineteen men, including Killen, were indicted on federal civil rights charges.

Seven were convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to 10 years. The all-white jury deadlocked in the case against Killen, and he was freed.

That was about the best most could hope for back then. Until this week, the state of Mississippi never brought murder charges against anyone in the case. And Killen has long denied any role in the murders.

“We now have people in local and state government who are willing to seek justice in these cases,” says David Ingebretsen, former executive director for the American Civil Liberties Union in Jackson, Miss.

Killen is the latest on the roster of elderly suspects brought before the bar for crimes committed when Southern blacks had little hope of seeing justice.

In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted of murder in the assassination 31 years earlier of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers. Four years later, former Klan imperial wizard Sam Bowers, then 76, was convicted in the 1966 firebomb death of Hattiesburg, Miss., grocer Vernon Dahmer, who was helping blacks register to vote.

And in 2002, four Klansmen were convicted of murder in the deadliest act of the Civil Rights era – the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four black girls.

Some might question the fairness – or the point – of reopening dusty files and hauling a stooped, bespectacled Killen into court on charges he has already faced.

Dees compares it to the continuing search for Nazi war criminals.

“I guess if there’s any fault, it is they waited 20 years beyond the time they could have gotten the same indictments,” he said.

Vernon Dahmer’s 79-year-old widow, Ellie, believes God will judge the men who committed these crimes. But that doesn’t mean justice shouldn’t be sought here on Earth, she said.

“He knew what he was doing then,” she said Friday from her home in Hattiesburg. “And just because the law or society let him get this old before they brought him to justice, they’ve got places in prison for old people.”

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