The past is never dead

the long version

On May 2, 1964, Klansman James Ford Seale picked up two black hitchhikers and drowned both young men in the Mississippi River. Seale spent more than forty years a free man, before finally facing trial in 2007. There could have been two defendants in the resulting case: James Ford Seale for kidnapping and murder, and the State of Mississippi for complicityknowingly aiding, abetting, and creating men like Seale. In The Past Is Never Dead, best-selling author Harry MacLean follows Seales trial, the legal difficulties of prosecuting kidnapping and murder charges decades after the fact, and the strain on a state contending with a past that cant be forgiven. MacLean's narrative is at once the account of a gripping legal battle and an acute meditation on the possibility of redemption. - Publisher.