CRIMINAL JURISDICTION

Fifth Circuit Orders Acquittal in 1964 Mississippi Murder Case, Cold Case Initiative Fails, Statute of Limitation Prevails

By: Houston Criminal Defense Attorney John T. Floyd and Senior Paralegal Billy Sinclair

Several years ago the Federal Bureau of Investigation created a Cold Case Initiative designed to bring to justice persons who committed horrific racially motivated crimes during the 1950s and 1960s civil rights era. One of those cases involved James Ford Seale, a former Mississippi deputy sheriff, who was convicted in June 2007 of kidnapping and conspiracy to commit kidnapping in the disappearances of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee.

The two 19 year old African American men were hitchhiking in rural Franklin County, Mississippi in 1964 when Seale and fellow Klansmen allegedly picked them up, drove them into the Homochito National Forest in Franklin County, brutally interrogated and beat them, bound them with duct tape, tied a car engine block and railroad rail to their bodies, and while they were still alive and presumably pleading for their lives, threw them into the Old Mississippi River. The bodies of the two men were accidentally found two months later during a search for three missing civil rights workers in another infamous civil rights murder case that would become known as the “Mississippi Burning” case.

Seal and another man named Charles Edwards were arrested for the murders of Moore and Dee in 1964 but were immediately released on bond and were never tried. After the FBI turned the case over to local authorities, a justice of the peace dismissed the charges saying witnesses refused to testify against Seale and Edwards.

Law enforcement interest in the case was revived when Charles Moore’s brother, Thomas, discovered that Seale was still alive during a visit to Franklin County in 2007 as part of a documentary being produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about the civil rights slayings. Thomas Moore gave the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi the FBI files on the case which he had obtained from a Mississippi reporter. That prompted Assistant U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton to assist in the creation of a task force that re-opened the four decade old murder cases. The FBI-led task force generated enough evidence to produce an indictment against Seale. The FBI hailed the indictment as a prime example of its efforts to close cold cases from the civil rights era. (more…)

Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd Discusses FBI’s Push to Legitimize Racial Profiling

On July 3, 2008 the Associated Press reported that the United States Justice Department was considering adoption of new rules that would allow the FBI to investigate persons without any probable cause of wrongdoing. FBI officials said that being able to target for selective investigation Muslims, Arabs and other racial and ethnic groups that fit a “terrorist profile” would enable the agency to fulfill a post 9/11 Congressional mandate to “root out” terrorists before they strike.

The Bush administration has consistently issued statements that it does not support the targeting of racial or ethnic groups for selective investigation. The proposed new Justice Department rules, however, would allow the FBI to consider both race and ethnicity among the factors that, according to AP, “could trigger a national security investigation.”

The FBI informed AP that under its existing rules the agency must have either specific evidence or probable cause to believe a crime has been committed before it can initiate an investigation against United States citizens or legal residents. The new rules under consideration would greatly expand the agency’s police powers allowing FBI agents to begin preliminary terrorism investigations based on mined public records or general intelligence data to put together individual behavioral profiles deemed suspicious. Some of the factors the FBI would consider in developing these profiles would include but not be limited to:

• Individuals traveling to regions known for terrorist activity;
• Access to weapons or military training; and
• The individual’s race or ethnicity.

“We don’t know what we don’t know, and the object is to cut down on that,” one anonymous FBI official told the AP in defense of the proposed rule changes. (more…)