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Reputed Klansman May Be Freed

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The Associated Press

Published: September 11, 2008

JACKSON, Miss. - Attorneys said Wednesday they are trying to free a reputed Ku Klux Klansman after a federal appeals court overturned the three life sentences he was serving for the 1964 abduction of two black teenagers who died after being beaten and thrown in the Mississippi River.

James Ford Seale, 73, had spent about a year in prison after being convicted in June 2007 on kidnapping and conspiracy charges related to the abductions of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee.

Authorities said the two 19-year-old friends were beaten by Klansmen and thrown, possibly still alive, into a muddy backwater of the Mississippi River amid rumors that black residents were planning an uprising.

A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found late Tuesday that the statute of limitations for kidnapping had expired in the four decades between Seale's alleged crime and the federal charges.

Seale was charged after Moore's brother, who was working on a film about the killings, found him in south Mississippi in 2005. The case, which took a back seat to the high-profile search for three civil rights workers who also disappeared in Mississippi that summer, had been cold for years. Many thought Seale was dead.

On Wednesday, Thomas Moore said he thinks the conviction was overturned on a technicality.

"He is not innocent. The community knows it. The world knows it," Moore said. "We are just in the third inning of a nine-inning ball game. ... It's not over with."

The ruling likely won't have a major impact on other cold cases from the civil rights era tried in recent years, Steffey said.

Most of those defendants were convicted on state murder charges, for which there are no statute of limitations.
Federal prosecutors said they were considering their options.

The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division said in a statement that the evidence at Seale's trial proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

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