Prosecutor in civil rights era cold case dies

JACKSON, Mississippi (AP) - Dunn Lampton, a former U.S. attorney in Mississippi who prosecuted a high-profile cold case from the civil rights era, has died...

Luther Vandross was outed as gay after his death.

JACKSON, Mississippi (AP) — Dunn Lampton, a former U.S. attorney in Mississippi who prosecuted a high-profile cold case from the civil rights era, has died.

Former acting U.S. Attorney Donald Burkhalter, one of the attorneys who served after Lampton’s 2009 retirement, says Lampton died Wednesday evening at age 60.

Among Dunn’s best-known cases was the prosecution of James Ford Seale, a reputed Ku Klux Klansman who died in prison earlier this month. Seale was convicted in 2007 of two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy to commit kidnapping in the 1964 deaths of two 19-year-old black men, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore.

The cause of death was not immediately released, but Lampton had been in poor health.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.

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