Washington – A new Justice Department office would investigate and prosecute “cold case” murders from the civil rights era, under a measure approved Wednesday by the Senate.
The Unsolved Crimes Section would target pre-1970 homicides motivated by racial hatred that remain unsolved, often because of lax state and federal prosecution at the time they occurred.
The bill was inspired by efforts to reopen the case of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy murdered in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, said Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo., who sponsored the legislation with Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.
“We want the murderers and their accomplices who are still living to know there’s an entire section of the Department of Justice that is going after them,” Talent said in a statement. “We need to unearth the truth and do justice because there cannot be healing without the truth.”
The Senate voted by unanimous consent to add the measure to the massive Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations bill, expected to pass the Senate this week.
A House-passed version of the bill does not include the civil rights measure, but lawmakers will try to include it in legislation that emerges from a conference committee.
Talent and Dodd introduced the bill in June, shortly after a Mississippi court sentenced 80-year-old former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen to 60 years in prison for the slayings of three civil rights workers in 1964.
The bill authorizes up to $5 million a year for the unit to investigate and try cases.
