JACKSON, Miss. (AP) – The reputed Ku Klux Klansman accused in the 1964 slayings of two black men has asked a federal judge to dismiss the charges, saying the statute of limitations has expired.

Assistant Federal Defender Kathy Nester filed the motion Friday in U.S. District Court on behalf of James Ford Seale, who pleaded not guilty Thursday to two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy.

U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton said Saturday he had not seen the motion and could not comment.

Seale, 71, could be sentenced to up to life in prison if convicted in the deaths of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee.

Prosecutors said Moore and Dee were seized and beaten by Klansmen, then thrown into the Mississippi River to drown.

A second white man long suspected in the attack, reputed KKK member Charles Marcus Edwards, 72, has not been charged. People close to the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity said Edwards was cooperating with authorities.

Seale and Edwards were arrested in the case in 1964. But the FBI – consumed by the search for three civil rights workers who had disappeared that summer – turned the case over to local authorities, who promptly threw out all charges.

The Justice Department reopened the case in 2000.

Seale remained jailed pending a bail hearing set for Monday. His court-appointed attorneys said he is suffering from cancer. His trial is scheduled for April 2, though that is expected to be delayed.

Seale’s arrest Wednesday marked the latest attempt by prosecutors in the South to close the books on crimes from the civil rights era that went unpunished. In recent years, authorities in Mississippi and Alabama won convictions in the 1963 assassination of NAACP activist Medgar Evers; the 1963 Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that killed four black girls; and the 1964 Philadelphia, Miss., slayings of the three civil rights workers- the case that led to the discovery of Moore’s and Dee’s bodies.

In the dismissal motion, Nester said prosecutors needed to have charged Seale under the law in effect at the time of the alleged offense. The statute of limitations on the federal crime of kidnapping is five years, meaning the deadline to charge Seale was 1969, she argued.

While the other cases dealt with murder charges, Seale’s is the first case in Mississippi to involve federal kidnapping charges.

Earnest Avants, convicted in 2003 on federal charges of aiding and abetting in the killing of a black handyman in the Homochitto National Forest in Mississippi in 1966, was among the defendants in recent civil rights era crimes who argued the statute of limitations had run out.

A federal judge, later upheld by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ruled that there was not an unreasonable delay in indicting Avants, because the federal government did not become aware it had jurisdiction until 1999 when it was discovered that the slaying occurred in a national forest.

AP-ES-01-27-07 1407EST

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