Sentencing of Rights Leader for Incest Is Delayed

A Loudoun County judge today postponed the sentencing hearing for James L. Bevel, a civil rights leader in the 1960s who in April was convicted of incest for having sex with his teenage daughter.

Bevel, 71, faces up to 15 years in prison in connection with events that took place from October 1992 to October 1994 in an apartment in Leesburg, when the daughter was 14 or 15. His court-appointed attorney requested the postponement after learning that, because of a mistake at the jail, Bevel had not been permitted earlier this week to review a psychological evaluation that had been prepared at the prosecutors' request.

Circuit Court Judge Burke F. McCahill rescheduled the hearing for Oct. 15.

Bevel was a confidant of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and was present when King was assassinated at a Memphis hotel in 1968.

Bevel became estranged from the civil rights movement when he came to the defense of King's confessed killer, James Earl Ray. In 1992, he ran for vice president as the running mate of Lyndon LaRouche Jr., whose political action committee is headquartered in Leesburg.