High court asked to review civil rights-era case (AP)

[Yahoo!_news]

AP - The U.S. Supreme Court should decide whether a reputed Ku Klux Klansman should have been tried on a kidnapping charge 43 years after two black men were abducted and slain in rural Mississippi, a federal appeals court said Thursday.

A majority of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said other Civil Rights Era cold cases could be affected by a Supreme Court ruling on whether time had run out for prosecutors to charge James Ford Seale.

Seale, now 73, was convicted in 2007 of abducting two 19-year-old friends who authorities said were beaten, weighted down and thrown, possibly still alive, into a Mississippi River backwater in 1964.

Since the conviction, Seale's case has worked its way through the 5th Circuit, including an acquittal that was overturned.

The 5th Circuit wants the nation's high court to decide whether the statute of limitations on kidnapping passed in the decades between the crime and Seale's conviction.

Federal prosecutors had opposed the issue being presented to the Supreme Court.

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