Feds prosecute 1960s KKK slayings

WASHINGTON, June 21 (UPI) -- The U.S. Justice Department said a federal jury in southern Mississippi has found a former Ku Klux Klan member guilty in the 1964 slayings of two black men.

Prosecutors said James Seale and other Klansmen abducted, beat and then drowned Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charlie Eddie Moore, who were both 19-years-old at the time.

"While the federal government's ability to bring civil rights era murders is limited by the provisions of then-existing federal law, the department is committed to vigorously prosecuting such cases," Wan J. Kim, Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Kim thanked the committee for its support of the "Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act," which would facilitate investigations of more than 100 civil rights era slayings identified by the FBI.