Court Declines Case of Klansmen in '64 Slayings
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday said it would not review a case arising from the 1964 kidnapping and killing of two black teenagers along the Mississippi-Louisiana border, an episode that continues to stir legal debate as it stokes memories of the ugliest racism.
The court declined to take the case of James F. Seale, a cancer-stricken former Ku Klux Klan member now in his mid-70s, who was convicted more than three decades after the deaths of Charles E. Moore and Henry H. Dee. Mr. Seale is serving a life term for kidnapping and conspiracy, and the Supreme Court’s action on Monday means his conviction stands.
The victims were 19 when they were abducted, tied to trees, whipped and thrown into a Mississippi River backwater on May 2, 1964. Horrible as they were, the killings did not attract much attention, because only weeks later they were overshadowed by the infamous killings of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., the case depicted in the movie “Mississippi Burning.”...
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The court declined to take the case of James F. Seale, a cancer-stricken former Ku Klux Klan member now in his mid-70s, who was convicted more than three decades after the deaths of Charles E. Moore and Henry H. Dee. Mr. Seale is serving a life term for kidnapping and conspiracy, and the Supreme Court’s action on Monday means his conviction stands.
The victims were 19 when they were abducted, tied to trees, whipped and thrown into a Mississippi River backwater on May 2, 1964. Horrible as they were, the killings did not attract much attention, because only weeks later they were overshadowed by the infamous killings of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., the case depicted in the movie “Mississippi Burning.”...