JACKSON, Miss. — A man acquitted this week on federal charges of abducting two black teenagers slain in 1964 is sick, has no criminal record and should be released from prison immediately, his attorneys said Thursday.
State and federal authorities, meanwhile, scrambled to review the decades-old case in hopes of keeping reputed Ku Klux Klansman James Ford Seale behind bars.
Seale, 73, was convicted in June 2007 and spent just over a year in prison on kidnapping and conspiracy charges related to the abduction and slayings of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee. The two 19-year-old friends were allegedly beaten, weighted down and thrown, possibly still alive, into a Mississippi River backwater in May 1964.
Seale is in a prison in Indiana, where he has been treated for cancer, bone spurs and other health problems. His attorneys said in their motion Thursday that he is neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community.
A three-judge panel of the appeals court overturned Seale’s conviction Tuesday, ruling that the statute of limitations for kidnapping had expired in the more than 40 years between the abductions and Seale’s arrest.
