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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 complicityknowingly aiding, abetting, and creating men like Seale.In "The Past Is Never Dead," best-selling author Harry 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."