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Ex-KKK member’s conviction overturned

NEW ORLEANS: An appeals court has overturned the conviction of a member of the white supremacist group, the Ku Klux Klan, who is serving three life sentences for his role in the 1964 abduction and killing of two black teenagers.

A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said on Tuesday it agreed with arguments by James Ford Seale’s attorney that the statute of limitations in the case had expired.

Mr. Seale was convicted in June 2007 of kidnapping and conspiracy in the abductions of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, both 19, who disappeared from Franklin County in Mississippi May 2, 1964. Their decomposed bodies were later pulled from the muddy waters of the Mississippi.

The 20-page ruling noted the alleged crimes occurred in 1964 and the indictment against Mr. Seale was issued in 2007.

“The more than 40-year delay clearly exceeded the limitations period,” said Judge Harold R. DeMoss Jr., writing for the panel of judges that included W. Eugene Davis and Jerry E. Smith.

“The district court erred by failing to recognise the presumption that changes affecting statutes of limitation apply retroactively, even without explicit direction from Congress.”

Defence attorney Kathy Nester had argued that a 1972 Congressional Act, which abolished the death penalty for kidnapping, also imposed a five-year statute of limitations.

Defence attorneys “identified this statute of limitations problem as a legitimate issue early on in the case,” she said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

Ms. Nester said the ruling effectively dismisses the case against her client but that prosecutors could ask the full appeals court to hear the case.

The decision was being reviewed by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C., said spokesman Dean Boyd. Ms. Nester said she had not spoken with Mr. Seale and did not know when she would be able to.

Mr. Seale was convicted largely on the testimony of Charles Marcus Edwards, a confessed Klansman who, for his testimony, received immunity from prosecution for his admitted role in the abductions.

Mr. Edwards testified that he didn’t participate in the killings, but Mr. Seale told him how he and other Klansmen bound Dee and Moore with tape, put them into a car trunk and drove them through part of eastern Louisiana to get to the area where the young men were dumped, still alive, into the river. — AP

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