So Seale remains in jail, and no one knows what to do about the two dozen other cases. If you investigate and prosecute, you could spend all the time and resources, get a conviction, only to see it later overturned. Or you may wait and decide to see what the Court eventually does on the issue, which could take a couple of years, and meanwhile witnesses and defendants die and cases grow even colder.

The urgency of the matter apparently meant nothing to the seven other justices.  They simply didn’t want to hear the case, apparently wary of setting a precedent that would end up overloading their docket.

So administrative, procedural concerns seem once again to have outweighed concerns that justice, however delayed, be done once and for all the victims of these old race murders.

There may be some truth to the adage that justice is too important a matter to be left to the lawyers.

The implications of the case are many. In the short term, it means that Seale will remain in prison. It also means that the appeal will continue, and that the Court could consider the issue at a later time.

In a larger sense, it means that the issue of the applicability of the statute of limitations to crimes such as Seale’s remains unsettled. The 5th Circuit estimated that two dozen other cases may be affected by the ruling.

If prosecutors in Mississippi and other southern states proceed with prosecutions of race murders from the sixties with the same statute of limitation problems, any convictions could later be overturned. This would result in a waste of resources, resources that could otherwise be used prosecuting these types of cases that don’t have statute of limitations problems.

Meanwhile, the odds look better and better that James Ford Seale, a very ill man, may well die in prison before the issue is finally resolved.

To get the Mississippi perspective of the story, see this article in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger.

I knew Jackson pretty well from my months there researching “The Past Is Never Dead,” but Oxford and Memphis were a different story. It rained for all four days of the trip–and I mean “rained”–and the GPS that came with the rental car was busted, so I was on my own. I hydroplaned on highway 55 heading north to Oxford, and nearly slid into a semi.

The noon magazine TV format in Jackson was a little over two minutes, the radio station about ten, so I was pleased to have a one-hour interview with the former mayor and owner of Square Books in Oxford which was taped on C-SPAN and will be on a show called “After Words” on the weekend of November 7 and 8. The owner is a wonderful man,  who had actually read the book and had a list of thoughtful questions. I don’t know how it’ll appear on TV, but it was fun doing it. I was waiting for John Grisham to walk in and ask for his book to be autogrpahed, but I learned that he’s moved to Charlotte.

Some of the stuff has a delayed fuse. A radio station in Memphis did a thirty minute interview, but it was taped and won’t be played until the weekend after Thanksgiving.  That interviewer was also knowledgeable on the subject. In fact, most of the interviewers, TV and radio alike, were appreciative of the fact that I felt that Mississippi was not given credit for the progress that it had made and was generally misunderstood by the Great White North. The owner of Square Books thanked me for writing the book.

All in all, a great adventure, or a continuation of the great adventure that began when I decided to to write the story of the trial of James Ford Seale and poke in the shadows and turn over the rocks in modern day Mississippi. Stay tuned–the fun has just begun.

I was a little groggy for an interview on Air America at 5:30 (MT) this morning, but the interviewer, Lionel, was clearly awake and wired. His questions were less about the trial and more about what led up to it. You have to learn to adjust to the interests of the interviewer, but still get your points in, and I’m such a nice guy it’s a little hard to assert myself.

I began Publication Day with a trip to the Tattered Cover, Denver’s famous and much-revered independent bookstore. The book was stacked flat on a table in the new non-fiction area, so I relieved another nearby book of its plastic stand and stood “The Past Is Never Dead” straight up, to look the prospective reader/buyer in the eye. I might need to stop in every day or so and check on its display.

For you Denver people, my signing at the Tattered Cover on Colfax is this Friday night at 7:30. On Sunday, I fly to Jackson for a signing at Lemuria on the 12th, then on to Oxford, for a signing at Square Books on the 13th, which will be taped by C-Span, and finally to Memphis on the 14th for a signing at Davis-Kidd.  I’m glad for an opportunity to talk about the new  book. In this tough publishing world, many authors aren’t touring at all.

Crime Rant

Bookpage

In Cold Blog 

Coming up:

Radio interviews on Air America and All Things Considered.

So, that left eighteen judges. I traveled to New Orleans in May of this year to watch the oral arguments, and I could not imagine a more terrifying scene for a lawyer. Standing alone at the podium, as eighteen federal judges in black robes stared/glared at you, interrupting you at will. And ask questions they did; one after another, occasionally interrupting each other.  I was sweating—I had read the briefs, and I still had a hard time following the arguments—but the lawyers managed to keep their cool. The basic questions were whether a court decision throwing out the statute Seale was charged under was to be applied retroactively or not.  If it was, then the statute of limitations had run five years after the crime and the prosecution was barred, which was what the three-person panel had held.

When I walked out of the courthouse, I felt fairly certain from the questions and the comments that the Court would affirm the panel’s decision and that Seale would soon be a free man. Wrong.  A few weeks later, the Court deadlocked 9 to 9 on the statute of limitations issue. Tie goes to the government, apparently, so Seale is still in the slammer.

That is no way to decide a man’s fate, or an issue of this importance. The fate of other civil rights crimes from the sixties could hang in the balance. The 5^th Circuit apparently agreed: A few weeks ago it voted to ask the Supreme Court to decide the issue. I get the image of a bunch of children squabbling over a toy, and finally asking their parents to decide who gets it.