JACKSON, Miss.-
Attorneys on Thursday continue the meticulous process of choosing a federal jury to hear a cold case from Mississippi’s past of bloody racial violence.
Reputed Ku Klux Klansman James Ford Seale is charged with kidnapping and conspiracy in the 1964 abduction and slaying of two black teenagers in southwest Mississippi. Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee were beaten and dumped, still alive, into the Mississippi River.
Seale, now 71, faces potentially damaging testimony from Charles Marcus Edwards, another reputed Klansman charged with him 43 years ago, before the state dropped its investigation. Prosecutors say Edwards has been granted immunity, and his cooperation is believed to be crucial to the revival of the investigation.
This is the latest of more than a dozen civil rights-era cases that have been prosecuted across the South since the early 1990s.
Seale arrived at the courthouse Wednesday wearing an orange jail jumpsuit. Before entering the courtroom, his shackles were removed and he put on khaki pants and a light blue dress shirt. He sat quietly in court, listening through wishbone-shaped earphones to amplify the sound because of hearing problems.
When he left the courthouse later, his jail jumpsuit was topped by a bullet-resistant vest.
The first day of jury selection brought a Faulknerian cast of characters that reflect Mississippi’s rural roots and modern anxieties.
Among the 21 people dismissed from the initial group of 76 potential jurors were a one-armed chicken grower who said he needs to tend to his poultry to pay his bills, a young woman in a Confederate flag T-shirt whose daddy injured his back when he fell off a roof and a farmer who has to care for his cows every day—especially now that it’s birthing season and one of the calves arrived headfirst last week.
Some people said they were battling alcohol or severe anxiety. One who remained in the jury pool said he’s helping rebuild Gulf Coast parks damaged 21 months ago by Hurricane Katrina.
U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate is keeping jurors’ names a secret at the request of prosecutors who said some might fear to serve in a case involving the Klan.
One potential juror from rural southwest Mississippi cried as she listed a litany of hardships—her husband works on an offshore oil rig, there’s no one else to care for their young daughter while he’s gone. The woman said she has hardly been able to sleep since she received her jury summons and she’s too scared to drive in Jackson’s traffic.
Under questioning from Wingate, the woman said one of her cousins is married to one of Seale’s cousins.
“That makes me nervous, even though I don’t know him personally,” the woman said nodding toward Seale.
In the courtroom, Moore’s brother, Thomas Moore of Colorado Springs, Colo., sat near two of Dee’s sisters, Mary Nell Byrd of Natchez, Miss., and Thelma Collins of Springfield, La.
“We’re at the doorstep of justice,” Thomas Moore said outside.
For decades, books and news accounts treated the killings of Charles Eddie Moore and Dee as footnotes in Mississippi’s troubled history. They were 19-year-old friends who were hitchhiking on May 2, 1964, near Meadville when carloads of Ku Klux Klansmen were chasing rumors of a possible armed insurrection by black people in the area.
Their decomposing bodies were found two months later, when authorities were conducting a massive search for slain civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, who disappeared from central Mississippi’s Neshoba County on June 21, 1964.
Seale and Edwards were arrested in 1964 in the deaths of Dee and Moore. But the FBI was consumed by the “Mississippi Burning” investigation of the three civil rights workers and the Dee-Moore case was turned over to local authorities, who threw out all charges against Seale and Edwards.
The Justice Department in 2000 reopened an investigation. It was closed again in 2003, then reopened in 2005. Seale was indicted and arrested in January at his home in the tiny town of Roxie.
More than 300 people from south Mississippi were summoned for jury duty, but fewer than one-third of them were required to be in court in Jackson for the first day. Prosecutors say a second group will be brought to the courthouse if attorneys can’t select 12 people and some alternates from the 55 who were to return Thursday.
Among those released from service was a young black man who said he’s trying to take summer classes so he can graduate from Jackson State University in August. Assistant public defender Kathy Nester quickly agreed to his request to be excused.
“We don’t want him to not graduate,” Nester said.
