Supporters of the prosecution embraced. "I think we got a little justice this morning," said Rita Bender, the widow of Mr. Schwerner.

Murmurs of dismay rose up earlier when the judge rued that "I have to pass upon a sentence to a person who is 80 years old, a person who has suffered a serious injury."

Jim Hood, the state attorney general, who tried the case with Mark Duncan, the district attorney, had said Mr. Killen could receive as little as one year on each charge.

"There was a knot in my stomach until he actually gave the sentence," said Angela Lewis, who was 10 days old when her father, Mr. Chaney, was killed. "The only thing I could do was sit and hope and pray it would be the maximum on all three convictions."

It was justice, Ms. Lewis said, but too long delayed. "It's what he deserves. But he's had 41 years to sit down to dinner with his children," she said. "That's something that me and my dad will never have."

Prosecutors said that a sheriff's deputy pulled over the three men on June 21, 1964, and jailed them long enough for Mr. Killen to organize a death trap. Jurors said they rejected murder charges because the evidence, much of it transcripts of testimony from a 1967 federal trial, did not prove that Mr. Killen knew that the men would be killed.

In 1967 the federal government tried 18 men for conspiring to deprive the victims of their civil rights. Seven were convicted; none served more than six years in prison. That jury deadlocked 11 to one in favor of convicting Mr. Killen; the holdout said she could not convict a preacher. The state had not brought charges in the deaths until Mr. Killen was prosecuted this year.