Justice still denied in Civil Rights-era slayings

This week a federal appeals court overturned the conviction of reputed Ku Klux Klan member James Ford Seale, who was serving three life sentences for his role in the 1964 abduction and killing of Charles E. Moore and Henry H. Dee, two black teenagers in southwest Mississippi. Seale, a former sheriff's deputy, was convicted in June 2007 on kidnapping and conspiracy charges but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the statute of limitations for kidnapping had expired in the decades between the crimes and the charges.

The victims, Moore and Dee, were two 19-year-olds beaten by Klansmen, bound with duct tape, weighted down by an engine block and railroad rail, and thrown alive into the Mississippi River, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Their decomposed bodies were found two months later during a search for three missing civil rights workers that would later be known as the Mississippi Burning case, CNN reports.

According to CNN, the appeals court ruling brought a surprise turn to a case that the FBI once trumpeted as an example of its efforts to close cold cases from the civil rights era.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group based in Montgomery, Alabama, calls the overturning of the Seale verdict a sad reminder of justice still denied in the Civil Rights-era murders. From the SPLC site:

"The ruling is disappointing, but not surprising," said SPLC President Richard Cohen, who testified before Congress last year in support of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. "It's a sad reminder that justice delayed is, too often, justice denied."

"Charles Moore and Henry Dee were killed during a time when there simply was no justice for African Americans in the South. The whole criminal justice system - from the police, to the prosecutors, to the juries and to the judges - was perverted by racial bigotry. Were it not for the callous indifference of white law enforcement officials, Seale would have been in jail long ago and the statute of limitations would not have mattered."

In related news, the push to reopen civil rights-era cold cases has stalled. Not one case has been prosecuted under the FBI's Cold Case Initiative, which began two years ago, the Associated Press reported this week.