Recent arrests in civil rights-era cases from Mississippi and San Francisco are important efforts to affirm the rule of law – no matter how many decades later.
A reported Ku Klux Klan member and former sheriff’s deputy was charged Wednesday with kidnapping in connection with the deaths some 42 years ago of two black hitchhikers in Mississippi.
That came on the heels of the arrests Tuesday of a group of former black militants accused of taking part in the 1971 murder of a San Francisco police sergeant.
The accusations in the two cases, oddly enough, mirror each other in that they involved extremist views and the tensions of race in a law enforcement context.
In the case of the Mississippi hitchhikers, the Colorado Springs brother of one of the dead men worked with a Canadian film producer to piece together what happened to Henry Dee and Charles Moore, who disappeared in 1964. James Ford Seale, 71, was arrested in the case.
The black teenagers were hitchhiking in a rural area when Seale picked them up, authorities said. He drove them to a secluded spot where Seale and other Klan members whipped them unconscious and dumped them in a river. Seale was arrested in the case, but the case was inexcusably dropped and he disappeared.
In the San Francisco case, eight men with ties to a radical group known as the Black Liberation Army were charged in connection with the shooting death of a desk sergeant as part of what authorities describe as a five-year campaign aimed at assassinating law enforcement officers.
The militants were said to have called in a phony bombing nearby, which mostly cleared out the station and left Sgt. John Young vulnerable. One assailant shoved a shotgun through an opening in bullet-proof glass and killed Young.
The case stalled in the 1970s when one suspect recounted beatings and torture at the hands of New Orleans police who had apprehended him. Prosecutors reopened the case in 1999, and while authorities haven’t revealed much about the investigation, they have said it has been buoyed by new forensic evidence.
In both Mississippi and San Francisco, the courts will take over now, and the methodical measuring of evidence and credibility will begin.
We hope for just prosecutions that will bring some comfort not just for the victims, but for society as a whole. Balancing the books of history, however delayed by circumstances, is an important task that sustains our faith in this country’s system of justice.
