Post date: Apr 05, 2013 3:30:49 PM
New video footage released of James Earl Ray, the man convicted of assassinating civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE, UNITED STATES (SHELBY COUNTYREGISTER AND ARCHIVES) - The Shelby County Register of Deeds in Memphis Tennessee released this week archival tapes of James Earl Ray, the man convicted of assassinating civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.
The video had been discovered in a forgotten box in the Archives of the Sheriff's Department in Memphis, where King had been shot and killed.The tapes, that can be accessed at the Shelby County Register of Deeds website, log the period Ray was incarcerated in Shelby County, showing the then-sheriff ofShelby County, Bill Morris, reading Ray his rights. The video also shows Ray being given a medical exam in jail.
In 1968, King traveled to Memphis to support sanitation workers who were striking against unfair working conditions and low pay. King was shot and killed while standing on a balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Hotel. He was 39.
Ray, a segregationist, confessed to the assassination but recanted shortly afterward and tried for years to get a new trial. He died in prison in 1998 while serving a 99-year sentence.