A Colorado man’s effort to get justice for his brother, murdered by reputed Klansmen in Mississippi in 1964, was dealt a setback Tuesday when a federal appeals court overturned a conviction in the case.
A three-judge panel in New Orleans ruled the statute of limitations had run out long before James Ford Seale’s conviction and life sentence last year in the abduction and killing of two 19-year-olds, Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee.
Moore’s brother, 65-year-old Thomas Moore, a retired Army sergeant living in Colorado Springs, had pressed for the investigation and found the witness who led to Seale’s indictment and conviction last year.
A woman who answered the telephone at Moore’s home Tuesday evening said he was not there and hung up.
However, Moore told The Associated Press the ruling “doesn’t take one ounce away from me.”
“James Ford Seale has spent more than a year in jail. I know I have disrupted his life.”
Seale, 73, was at a special-needs federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. His medical conditions include cancer.
A 1972 congressional act that abolished the death penalty for kidnapping also imposed a five-year statute of limitations on prosecutions.
Prosecutors could still ask the appeals court to reconsider.
Seale was convicted on the testimony of Charles Marcus Edwards, a confessed former Klansman turned church deacon who received immunity in exchange for testimony.
With the case long turned cold, Thomas Moore continued his pursuit of justice for his older brother, eventually confronting Edwards outside his rural Mississippi church in 2006. Edwards agreed to testify.
Edwards testified that Seale, a 29-year-old truck driver in 1964, had bound the two teenagers with tape, beaten them and dumped their writhing bodies into the river.
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com
