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KKK man guilty of murder
15/06/2007 12:59 - (SA)
Emily Wagster Pettus
Jackson, Mississippi - A jury has convicted a reputed member of the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan of kidnapping and conspiracy in the 1964 deaths of two black teenagers in southwest Mississippi.
James Ford Seale, 71, had pleaded not guilty to charges related to the deaths of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee. The 19-year-olds disappeared from Franklin County on May 2, 1964, and their bodies were found later in the Mississippi River.
Federal prosecutors indicted Seale in January almost 43 years after the slayings. When he is sentenced on August 24, he faces life in prison on the two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy.
Jurors deliberated just a few hours before convicting Seale on Thursday.
The prosecution's star witness was Charles Marcus Edwards, a confessed Klansman. During closing arguments earlier on Thursday, prosecutors acknowledged they made "a deal with the devil" but said that offering immunity to Edwards to get his testimony against Seale was the only way to get justice.
Edwards testified that he and Seale belonged to the same Klan chapter, or "klavern", that was led by Seale's father. Seale has denied he belonged to the Klan.
Edwards testified that Dee and Moore were stuffed, alive, into the trunk of Seale's Volkswagen and driven to a farm. They were later tied up and driven across the Mississippi River into Louisiana, Edwards said, and Seale told him that Dee and Moore were attached to heavy weights and dumped alive into the river.
"Those two 19-year-old kids had to have been absolutely terrified," US Attorney Dunn Lampton told jurors, who sat quietly.
In its closing arguments, the defence asserted that Seale should be acquitted because the case was based on the word of an "admitted liar".
- SAPA
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