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 complicity — knowingly aiding, abetting, and creating men like Seale.
In The Past Is Never Dead, best-selling author Harry N. MacLean follows Seale’s 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 can’t be forgiven.
MacLean’s narrative is at once the account of a gripping legal battle and an acute meditation on the possibility of redemption.