James Ford Seale | |
---|---|
Born | |
Died | August 2, 2011 | (aged 76)
Occupation | Lumber worker |
Criminal status | Deceased |
Allegiance | Ku Klux Klan |
Motive | White supremacy |
Conviction(s) | Kidnapping (18 U.S.C. § 1201) (2 counts) Conspiracy to commit kidnapping (18 U.S.C. § 1201) |
Criminal penalty | Life imprisonment |
Details | |
Victims | Henry Hezekiah Dee, 19 Charles Eddie Moore, 19 |
Date | May 2, 1964 |
Country | United States |
State(s) | Mississippi |
James Ford Seale (June 25, 1935[1] – August 2, 2011) was a Ku Klux Klan member charged by the U.S. Justice Department on January 24, 2007, and subsequently convicted on June 14, 2007, for the May 1964 kidnapping and murder of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, two African-American young men in Meadville, Mississippi.[2] At the time of his arrest, Seale worked at a lumber plant in Roxie, Mississippi. He also worked as a crop duster and was a police officer in Louisiana briefly in the 1970s.[3] He was a member of the militant Klan organization known as the Silver Dollar Group,[4] whose members were identified with a silver dollar; occasionally minted the year of the member's birth.[5]
Seale was convicted on June 14, 2007, by a federal jury on one count of conspiracy to kidnap two persons, and two counts of kidnapping.[6] He was sentenced on August 24, 2007, to three life terms for his part in the 1964 murders of the two Mississippi teens. In 2008, Seale's kidnapping conviction was overturned by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, before being reinstated by that court sitting en banc the following year. He was incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he died in 2011.[7]