Bill provides new resources and authority to create two new offices at the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute unsolved racially motivated murders from the early civil rights era
The Issue:
Last night President Bush signed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act into law. This legislation, which the NAACP strongly supported, put additional federal resources into solving many of the heinous crimes that occurred in the early days of the civil rights struggle that remain unsolved and bringing those who perpetrated the crimes to justice. By investing new resources into these decades-old crimes we may finally be able to bring resolution to these cases and allow some closure for the victims’ loved ones, as well as our Nation as a whole.
Witnesses and evidence to these crimes are aging and time is of the essence. It is imperative to bring murderers to justice, even if several decades have passed since these crimes aimed at intimidating all those fighting for civil rights in our Nation were committed. This was proven by the historic 2005 conviction of Edgar Ray Killen for the 1964 deaths of three Civil Rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, and the 1994 conviction of Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers more than 30 years earlier.
This bill creates two new offices within the Department of Justice whose sole purpose is to investigate these crimes. The Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Investigative Office, a new FBI office headed by a Chief Investigator, will aggressively investigate pre-1970 cases in coordination with state and local law enforcement officials that resulted in death and remain unsolved. This office will do everything possible to make certain those who have committed these murders are brought to justice. The Unsolved Crimes Section, a new office within the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, will focus specifically on prosecuting these cases. If a crime other than murder is discovered during the course of an inquiry it will be referred to the appropriate law enforcement officials. The Section will report its findings to Congress annually on September 30th, the end of the federal fiscal year.
The bill authorizes $11.5 million in annual appropriations: $5 million for the Unsolved Crimes Section, $5 million for the Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Investigative Office and $1.5 million for Community Relations Service of the Department of Justice to work with local communities in identifying these cases.
The NAACP put pressure on Congress to include language in the law, which was accepted, to ensure that any funds used for these new endeavors are not taken out of funds for investigating current hate crimes.
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