User:Undercoverecho/Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act

The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Reauthorization Act of 2016 works to investigate racially motivated cold cases from the Civil Rights Era. The original bill was signed into law on October 8, 2006, and was then reauthorized on December 16, 2016. The Act was named after Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy murdered in 1955 by two white men in Mississippi who were never charged for their crimes, and later admitted to it. The woman who accused Till of assaulting her, 60 years later, admitted to lying about it. The FBI, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and the National Urban League have partnered to uproot and solve uninvestigated murders of people of color.

Lead

"The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act is an Act of the United States Congress introduced by John Lewis (GA-5) that allows [the reopening of] cold cases of suspected violent crimes committed against African Americans before 1970 to be reopened. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the legislation on June 20, 2007, by a vote of 422 to 2. The U.S. Senate passed the legislation on September 24, 2008, by unanimous consent, and President George W. Bush signed the bill into law on October 7." copied from Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act

"Background to legislation[edit]

Racially motivated violent crimes were committed in the United States as part of suppression of minorities, especially in the South. These crimes, often lynchings of Black men, were rarely investigated or prosecuted by states. The killings were part of an oppressive order of Jim Crow custom and law, and lynchings were a form of terrorism against Black people. During the Jim Crow era, the U.S. experienced a rise in violent crime against Black Americans. A 2015 study found that almost four thousand lynchings, took place in Southern America between 1877 and 1950. This report compiled an increased number of such documented killings, most of which occurred in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. The vast majority of people responsible for these lynchings, generally mobs or small groups of white local residents, were never held responsible for their actions. Racially-based crimes followed accusations of criminal activity or behavior considered unacceptable for their racial group.

Origin of the name of the act[edit]

Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old Black boy from Chicago. In the summer of 1955, on a visit to family in Mississippi, Till was accused of whistling at, or flirting with, a young, married White woman in a grocery store. He was abducted, beaten, mutilated, and shot in the head before his body was weighted down in a nearby river. Till's murderers were tried but were acquitted by an all-white jury. (At the time, Black people were prohibited from voting and thus generally excluded from juries.) The two men later confessed to killing Till in an interview with Life magazine, but were never retried or convicted for his murder. Many years later, the woman who had accused Till of behaving inappropriately admitted that she had lied about the events.

The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, passed in 2008, authorized the federal government to reopen racially-based cold cases, especially from the civil rights era, for further investigation and prosecution. The legislation was named for Till because his case is a famous example of a racial killing for which no one was successful tried. The bill works towards gathering more information on unsolved cases to uncover answers for family members, and solve cases using new information.

Legislation[edit]

The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act was first proposed in 2007 and was passed by Congress and signed by the president in 2008. In the House of Representatives, the original sponsors of the bill were Rep. John Lewis (D-Georgia), Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, and Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan). In the Senate, the effort was led by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri), Sen. Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont).

The bill creates increased collaboration between local or state law enforcement, the FBI, and other elements of the Department of Justice. Overall, its primary purpose is to authorize investigation and prosecution of cold cases that appear related to civil rights violations. As of its authorization in 2008, the bill could apply to any case of a crime committed before December 31, 1969.

In addition, the bill provides for assisting the families of victims of civil rights crimes.

Success[edit]

As a result of new investigations undertaken of some cold cases from the Civil Rights era, several cases have been closed, in terms of determining the facts. But governments have been less successful The bill has had minimal success in prosecuting the perpetrators of these crimes, as some suspects and witnesses have died in the intervening decades.

However, prosecutions have occurred in conjunction with the passing of the bill. in The U.S. Department of Justice reopened the case of Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was fatally shot in Alabama in 1964 by James Fowler, a state police officer. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and served six months in prison in 2010, leading to the closing of the case.

Certain legal protections prevent prosecution in various cases. The Fifth Amendment protects Americans from being tried twice on charges for which they have already been found not guilty. Ex post facto clauses in the U.S. Constitution prevent individuals from being tried for crimes that were legal when committed, even if they are illegal now. As the Department of Justice has noted, prosecution of cold cases has been difficult, given the length of time since the events.

2016 Reauthorization[edit]

The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act was reauthorized on December 16, 2016. The Reauthorization Act contained a number of new provisions intended to increase success of the government's actions. It aimed to connect the FBI, the Department of Justice, and law enforcement officers to organizations, such as universities or advocacy groups, that had also been investigating cold cases from the Civil Rights era. Other modifications to the bill included changing the time period to which the bill applied, clarifying the purpose of the bill, urging the Department of Justice to review specific cases, and eliminating the sunset provision of the original bill, which stated that the bill expired at the end of the 2017 fiscal year." copied from Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act

References

Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Reauthorization Act. (n.d.). Retrieved April 5, 2023, from https://coldcaselaw.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Reauthorization-Act.pdf

Emmett Till Unsolved civil rights crime act. NAACP. (2022, June 13). Retrieved April 5, 2023, from https://naacp.org/resources/emmett-till-unsolved-civil-rights-crime-act

"ex post facto". LII / Legal Information Institute. Retrieved 2023-10-27.

Cold case initiative. The United States Department of Justice. (2022, November 21). Retrieved April 3, 2023, from https://www.justice.gov/crt/cold-case-initiative

"Civil Rights Division | Cold Case Initiative". www.justice.gov. 2015-08-06. Retrieved 2023-10-27.

"Civil Rights Division | Jimmie Lee Jackson - Notice to Close File | United States Department of Justice". www.justice.gov. 2017-03-20. Retrieved 2023-10-27.

Brown, D. N. L. (2021, October 28). Unsolved and overlooked murders: Investigating cold cases of the Civil Rights Era. The Washington Post. Retrieved April 5, 2023, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/06/26/unsolved-and-overlooked-investigating-cold-cases-of-the-civil-rights-era/

www.govinfo.govhttps://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-114publ325/html/PLAW-114publ325.htm. Retrieved 2023-10-27.

A&E Television Networks. (n.d.). Emmett Till is murdered. History.com. Retrieved April 5, 2023, from https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-death-of-emmett-till

"History of Lynching in America | NAACP". naacp.org. Retrieved 2023-10-27.

Pool, H. (2015). Mourning Emmett Till. Law, Culture and the Humanities, 11(3), 414-444. https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872112440235