The Past Is Never Dead: The Trial of James Ford Seale and Mississippi's Struggle for Redemption (Unabridged‪)‬

On May 2, 1964, Klansman James Ford Seale picked up two black hitchhikers and drowned the young men in the Mississippi River. Seale spent more than 40 years a free man, before finally facing trial in 2007. But 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, Edgar Award-winning author Harry MacLean follows Seale's trial, the legal difficulties of prosecuting kidnapping and murder charges decades later, and the strain on a state contending with a past that cannot be forgiven. MacLean's narrative is the account of a gripping legal battle and an acute meditation on the possibility of redemption.