An appeals court has overturned the conviction last year of a Ku Klux Klan member in the deaths of two black Mississippi teenagers in 1964.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans says it agrees with arguments by James Ford Seale's attorney that the statute of limitations in the case had expired.
Seale was convicted of kidnapping and conspiracy in the abductions of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee.
Both men were 19.
The men disappeared from Franklin County in Mississippi on May 2, 1964.
Their decomposed bodies were pulled more than two months later from the Mississippi River.
Seale has been serving three life sentences.
The case was among many unsolved civil-rights-era crimes prosecutors have revived since the early 1990s.
Now those revived cases are on shaky grounds.
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