Day 11: The Defense Rests

by Matt Saldaña
June 13, 2007

At 3:05 p.m. on Wednesday, after calling just four witnesses, the defense in the James Ford Seale federal kidnapping and conspiracy trial rested their case. The prosecution then declined its opportunity to call rebuttal witnesses. Seale, addressed by U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate, declined to take the stand in his own defense.

"Do you elect not to testify?" the judge asked Seale, who was dressed in a light blue oxford shirt and dark slacks.

"Yes, sir," Seale replied, standing and speaking into a microphone for the first time during his trial.

Earlier, Seale’s younger brother, Don Seale, testified about marks he had seen on James Ford Seale’s body following his arrest in 1964 for the murders of Charles Moore and Henry Dee. District Attorney Lenox Forman used allegations of Seale’s mistreatment during his arrest as a rationale to drop charges against Seale and co-defendant Charles Marcus Edwards in 1965, telling the FBI that a grand jury would not indict the men because of stories they were abused by law enforcement.

Wearing a checkered blue shirt and square glasses, Don Seale placed a blue mesh trucker hat onto the witness stand before taking his oath. As the witness spoke, Wingate allowed a copy of the affidavit that alleged Seale’s mistreatment—filed by Franklin County Sheriff Wayne Hutto, an alleged co-conspirator in the Dee-Moore murders—to appear on court monitors. However, the judge did not allow Don Seale to refer to the document, since he had no firsthand knowledge of its existence.

Don Seale, who received a subpoena from James Ford Seale’s lawyers to testify, said that he had spoken to his brother twice over the past 25 years and did not “get along too good” with him. When asked how he felt when he was served the subpoena, he replied: “I’m wasn’t proud of it.”

“He had some sore ribs and some red spots on his face—what happened, I don’t know,” he said about James Ford Seale’s appearance following his arrest in 1964.

During cross-examination, Special Litigation Counsel Paige Fitzgerald asked Don Seale about the brothers’ falling out.

“Well, my mother died, and (Jack and James Seale) took all of the stuff my daddy had,” Don Seale said.

When asked about James Ford Seale’s alleged membership in the Ku Klux Klan, Don Seale replied: “I suspected. But as far as knowing—there’s a lot of people in Franklin County who were suspected.”

After viewing the racial epithet-filled letter to the Franklin Advocate that James Ford Seale allegedly authored on July 23, 1964, Don Seale said that he had never seen the document. When asked if some of the racist statements aligned with his brother’s views, Don Seale replied: “I don’t know that I ever heard him say anything like that.”

Fitzgerald then asked Don Seale about racist statements he himself had reportedly made to FBI agents in Jan. 2007.

“You can go over there and call them niggers, and they’d laugh. They all know their place in life,” Fitzgerald quoted Don Seale as saying, referring to African Americans.

Don Seale denied making that exact statement. Upon Fitzgerald’s further questioning, he also denied his own membership in the Klan.

In addition to Don Seale, forensic pathologist James Lauridson, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers employee John Barnes and Vicksburg boat builder James Lynn took the stand to complete the defense’s case.

Lauridson disagreed with government witness Steven Hayne, a medical examiner in Mississippi, who determined the probable cause of Dee and Moore’s death as fresh-water drowning. Unlike Hayne, Lauridson had not considered the testimony of Charles Edwards or the recovery team who found the decomposed lower torsos of Dee and Moore on July 12 and 13, 1964. Lauridson did not rule out fresh-water drowning as a cause of death. He agreed with Hayne, who testified last Friday, that the probable manner of death was homicide.

Barnes and Lynn provided testimony about the geography of Davis Island, where Dee and Moore were allegedly weighted down and drowned.

Beginning at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow, Wingate will make his final decisions on the wording of instructions to deliver to jurors at 10 a.m. After these jury instructions, each side will deliver closing arguments and the jury will then deliberate until reaching a decision. Tomorrow, Wingate will decide whether to sequester jurors overnight, if deliberations last that long.

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