AL court rules against dead ex-Klansman convicted of 1963 church bombing

The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals issued a ruling Friday denying a rehearing for Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Ku Klux Klansman convicted in 2002 of the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. The bomb killed four black girls. The ruling came one day after Cherry died in prisonat the age of 74. The appeals court in August had upheld Cherry's four murder convictions and life sentences in the death of the girls. Two other former Klansman were convicted in the bombing: Robert Chambliss, who died in prison, and Thomas Blanton Junior, who remains in prison on a life sentence[more]