The FBI might have reluctantly reopened many cold cases from the fifties and sixties, at the insistence of Congress and the Emmett Till Bill, and the Innocence Project may have freed many wrongfully convicted blacks, but there's no real investigation of those responsible for the crimes.
The FBI knows how to conduct such complicated investigations - you marshal all of the forces of the United States government by forming a special Task Force consisting of agents from every agency and department, as well as liaisons with state and local government law enforcement agencies. Investigators and field agents work closely with reseachers that scan news archives and documents and prosecuting attorneys who will take the evidence to a grand jury that is responsible for indicting suspects for trial..
Such an effort however, is beyond the capabilities of the FBI and the US Department of Justice, as this New York Times articles shows. - BK
FERRIDAY, La.
— In the spring of 1965, the Federal Bureau
of Investigation in Washington
received a letter from Concordia Parish in northeastern Louisiana .
Addressed to the bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, the letter pleaded for
justice in the killing of a well-respected black merchant.
Courtesy of Concordia Sentinel
STILL OPEN Frank Morris, wearing a visor at center,
suffered fatal burns when his shoe-repair shop in Ferriday ,
La. , was set on fire in 1964. No one has
ever been prosecuted for his death.
A few months earlier, the businessman, Frank Morris, had
come upon two white men early one morning at the front of his shoe-repair shop,
one pointing a shotgun at him, the other holding a canister of gas. A match was
ignited, a conflagration begun, and Morris died four days later of his burns
without naming the men, perhaps fearing retribution against his family.
The letter expressed grave concern that the crime would go
unpunished because the local police were probably complicit. “Your office is
our only hope so don’t fail us,” it concluded. It was signed:
“Yours truly, The Colored People of Concordia Parish.”
Nearly five decades later, the Justice Department has
written back — not directly to the family of Mr. Morris or to the black
community of Concordia Parish, but to dozens of other families who lost loved
ones during this country’s tumultuous and violent civil rights era.
Several years ago, the F.B.I. began reopening cold cases
from that era — 112 at last count — raising hopes among some for justice. In
all but about 20, though, the families of the long dead have received letters,
often hand-delivered by F.B.I. agents, that say their cases have been closed,
there is nothing more to be done — and please accept our condolences.
Simultaneously intimate and bureaucratic, these letters
serve as epistolary echoes of an increasingly distant time. To some, they
reflect the elusiveness of resolution in cases decades old; to others, they
represent another missed opportunity for a full accounting of what
happened, and why.
Grace Hall Miller, a retired school board member in Newton ,
Ga. , received one of these letters two
years ago. It recounted a day in March 1965 that she hardly could have
forgotten, when a man named Cal Hall Jr. fatally shot her husband, Hosie
Miller, a farmer and church deacon, in a dispute over cows. Mr. Hall, who
was white, shot Mr. Miller, who was black, in the back.
The letter recalled the notorious travel of the case, from
repeated failures by grand juries to indict Mr. Hall to a “disproportionately
white” jury’s finding against the Miller family in a wrongful-death lawsuit. It
also summed up what the F.B.I. had done after reopening the case: interviews
with Ms. Miller and a family friend, a check with the local sheriff’s office,
and a search of county death records.
“After careful review of this incident, we have concluded
that the now deceased Cal Hall Jr. acted alone when he shot and killed your
husband, and therefore, we have no choice but to close our investigation,” the
letter said. “We regret that we cannot be of further assistance to you.
Again, please accept our sincere condolences for the loss of your husband” — a
man who had died nearly a half-century earlier.
Ms. Miller, now 80, said that she had placed judgment in
God’s hands long ago, and could not understand why the F.B.I. had reopened the
case to give it only a cursory review. “I guess they were just trying to make a
show,” she said.
One of Ms. Miller’s daughters is Shirley Sherrod, who
was forced
to resign from her job with the federal Agriculture Department in 2010
after a conservative blogger edited a video of a public appearance to make her
appear racist. The White House later apologized, and she was offered a new job.
“It’s very unsatisfying,” said Ms. Sherrod, one of six
children. “Even after all these years, the system wouldn’t do anything. We
didn’t get justice.”
Adam S. Lee, the chief of the F.B.I. section overseeing
civil rights, said that the bureau had been rigorous in pursuing these cold
cases, following any evidence that might lead to prosecutions. But, he added,
“That doesn’t bring the emotional closure that the public wants, or needs, in
cases like this.”
Unsolved Crimes
In 2006, the F.B.I. began a cold-case initiative that it
described as a comprehensive effort to investigate racially motivated murders
from the civil rights era. That effort became a mandate two years later when
Congress passed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, named after
the 14-year-old black boy who was tortured and killed in Mississippi in 1955,
for supposedly flirting with a white woman.
From the outset, the government cited the formidable
challenges it faced: the limited federal jurisdiction in some cases, the
statute of limitations in others, and, of course, time’s passage. Suspects and
witnesses die. Evidence is lost. Memories dull.
Champions of the cold-case initiative debated its primary
purpose. Was it justice, which would mean chasing those few cases with the
highest likelihood of prosecution? Or was it truth, which would mean pursuing
the facts in scores of cases, no matter that the principal players might
be dead?
“Truth was the more realistic goal,” said Alvin Sykes, a human rights
worker and an early champion of what became the Till Act, who envisioned a
broad, aggressive effort to identify and investigate old civil rights cases.
But he lowered his expectations, he said, once the narrower scope of the
initiative became clear.
The law authorized tens of millions of dollars for the
project, but so far only $2.8 million has come through. In addition, some
critics say that the expansive list of cases compiled by the F.B.I. — ranging
from the well known to the more obscure, culled from old news clippings —
resulted in the quick closing of most cases and the draining of resources from
the few cases in which a prosecution might have been achieved.
Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which
provided the F.B.I. with some possible cases, recalled some unease at the time
about publicizing so many cases with very low chances of resolution. “I was
worried about giving people false hope,” he said.
Limited Results
Families who held out hope for prosecution have been
disappointed. In a report to Congress in October, the Justice Department
acknowledged the low yield from what it always considered to be long-shot
efforts to develop cases worthy of prosecution.
The report said the F.B.I.’s cold-case initiative had
resulted in one successful federal prosecution, of James Ford Seale,
who was convicted in 2007 in connection with the deaths of two young black men
in 1964. It also said the F.B.I. had assisted in the 2010 state prosecution of
a former Alabama trooper, James
Bonard Fowler, in the shooting death of Jimmie
Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old civil rights marcher who died after a
confrontation with the police in 1965.
Left unsaid in the report was that these prosecutions were
prompted in large part by the work of investigative journalists like Jerry
Mitchell of The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., John Fleming of the The
Anniston Star in Alabama, and David Ridgen, a Canadian documentary filmmaker.
Also left unsaid was how the Justice Department’s approach
and commitment to the endeavor have been questioned by some of those who have
been toiling in the same troubled fields of history.
“That’s what we’ve been struggling with for the last six
years,” said Janis L. McDonald, a law professor at Syracuse University and a
co-director of the law school’s Cold Case Justice Initiative. “We’ve been
asking for a regional task force, or for them to go out and say how many people
really were killed. Neither has been the focus of the Justice Department.”
But F.B.I. officials said that in many cases people were
interviewed, often repeatedly, during the original murder investigations. With
memories fading as the decades pass, they said, those initial interviews often
determine whom to interview or reinterview in the current investigation.
“I have not seen a perfunctory approach in any of these
cases,” said Mr. Lee, the F.B.I. section chief.
Retellings, and Condolences
Then there are the letters.
As the Justice Department closed cases, F.B.I. agents were
sent to hand-deliver letters of explanation to the next of kin. Sometimes,
relatives could not be found or simply “didn’t want to hear from us,” Mr. Lee
said.
Copies of dozens of these letters were given to The New York
Times by James Shelledy, a journalist in residence at the Manship School of Mass
Communication at Louisiana State University, and a team of journalism
students who have been working on a project involving unsolved killings from
the civil rights era. They obtained the letters through the Freedom of
Information Act.
Here is the case of Clinton
Melton, a gas station attendant in Glendora ,
Miss. , who found himself in a dispute with
a customer, Elmer Otis Kimbell, over the amount of gas he had just pumped. Mr.
Kimbell vowed to kill Mr. Melton, and did just that, shooting the unarmed Mr.
Melton three times with a shotgun.
“On March 13, 1956 ,
an all-white, all-male jury acquitted Mr. Kimbell, despite the weight of the
testimonial and physical evidence contradicting Mr. Kimbell’s claim that he
acted in self-defense,” the government wrote in a letter to Mr. Melton’s
family. “Mr. Kimbell died in February 1985.”
Here is the case of Jasper
Greenwood, whose decomposed body was found next to his car in Vicksburg ,
Miss. According to the F.B.I., it turned out that Mr. Greenwood was with a
married woman in a “lover’s lane” when he suffered a fatal heart attack — and
she fled the scene.
Here is the case of John
Earl Reese, who was dancing with friends in a cafe in Longview ,
Tex. , when gunfire sprayed from a
passing car killed him and
injured two cousins. Two young white men, Perry Dean Ross and Joe Simpson, were
eventually indicted, although charges against Mr. Simpson were dropped when he
agreed to testify against Mr. Ross — who was given a suspended sentence on a
murder conviction.
The F.B.I. closed its resurrected investigation because it
concluded that Mr. Ross and Mr. Simpson, both long dead, had acted alone.
Still, Joyce Nelson Crockett, one of the cousins wounded that night, expressed
gratitude for the government’s interest.
“It did more good than no good,” Ms. Crockett, who is 70 and
in poor health, said of the letter. “To know it was important enough to look
into, because what they did was wrong. They had no reason to do it. They were
youngsters, just as I was.”
Here, too, is the case of Herbert
Orsby, a New Orleans boy of 14
whose body was found in 1964 in the Big Black River near
rural Pickens , Miss. ,
where he had been visiting his grandmother. Some civil rights workers said they
had seen a young man matching Herbert’s description being forced into a pickup truck at gunpoint,
and there were rumors that Herbert had been wearing a T-shirt bearing the
acronym for the Congress of Racial Equality: C.O.R.E.
But an F.B.I. investigation at the time found no evidence of
foul play and concluded that the boy had drowned. For years afterward,
lingering suspicions were rarely discussed within the Orsby family.
“Back in those days in Mississippi ,
you didn’t stir up stuff,” said Roy Orsby, one of Herbert’s brothers, now 60
years old.
After 46 years of not stirring up stuff, Mr. Orsby received
a visit from an F.B.I. agent who said the bureau was looking into the case. A
few weeks later, Mr. Orsby said, he received a letter.
It said agents had retrieved the files from the original
1964 investigation, contacted Mississippi officials and two civil rights
organizations, conducted searches of historical records at libraries and on
the Internet, and “solicited
information about the case via a press release.”
The conclusion: “After careful review of this incident,
there is insufficient evidence to indicate that your brother’s death
constitutes a racially motivated homicide.”
The experience was both brief and strange. “I figure, well
there it goes again, back under the bridge,” Mr. Orsby said. “Never did find
out what happened.”
Still, Margaret A. Burnham, a law professor and the founder
of the Civil Rights and
Restorative Justice Program at the Northeastern University School
of Law, said these letters mattered, even if devoid of resolution.
“Setting aside whether the F.B.I. could have done more, I
respect the dignity with which they are accepting responsibility for letting
families know how justice failed them,” Ms. Burnham said. “Whether it’s a
sufficient thing, I don’t know. But it’s a necessary thing.”
Still Unresolved
As difficult as it might be to receive a letter saying that
the investigation into your loved one’s death is being closed without a
satisfying conclusion, there is the different pain of having no resolution at
all, as in the 20 or so cold cases that remain open.
Three of them concern killings that took place on or near a
12-mile stretch of Highway 84, from here in Ferriday to the Mississippi
city of Natchez , across the Mississippi
River . All three have been extensively investigated by Stanley
Nelson, a reporter for a local weekly newspaper, The Concordia Sentinel, who
said the F.B.I. had failed to give the cold cases the proper commitment because
it had not assigned agents to investigate them full time.
“There’s no way they can devote the time that’s really
necessary to resolve these cases,” said Mr. Nelson, who believes that the cases
are open in part because he has kept publicizing them. “They’re not out in the
communities canvassing, talking to people, knocking on doors, running people
down.”
This part of the South is haunted by unanswered questions.
In Ferriday, all that remains of the shoe store that was
burned down in 1964 — with its black owner, Frank Morris, held inside at
gunpoint — is a concrete slab in an empty lot. No one has ever been arrested,
but in recent years there have been grand jury investigations, most likely
prompted by Mr. Nelson’s reports that a suspect is still alive.
A few miles southeast on Highway 84, in a place called
Vidalia, is the Budget Inn motel. A half-century ago, it was called the
Shamrock Inn, where the Silver Dollar Group — an extreme faction of the Ku Klux
Klan — used to meet in the coffee shop, and where, in 1964, a black porter named
Joe Ed Edwards was said to have kissed the motel’s night clerk, a white woman.
Two days later, Mr. Edwards disappeared, for good.
And a few miles farther on, across the Natchez-Vidalia
Bridge in Mississippi ,
a plaque marks the spot where, in 1967, a Chevy pickup driven by Wharlest
Jackson, a Korean War veteran, blew up. He had just accepted a promotion to a
supervisory — that is, white — position at a tire plant.
F.B.I. agents soon swarmed the area, infiltrating the Silver
Dollar Group and forcing an end to its campaign of terror, though without any
arrests. The children of Mr. Jackson do not expect the cold-case initiative to
change the cold absence of resolution, and have come to see the government’s
initiative as worse than nothing.
“Why they open it and why they open up wounds, I don’t
know,” said Debra Sylvester, one of Mr. Jackson’s daughters. “My mama always
said all you can do is pray. One day they’re going to have to give an account. One day they’re
going to have to give an account to their maker.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Lee, of the F.B.I., said the bureau would
probably close more cases by June. When asked whether criminal charges might
be filed, he said, “Likely not.”
No comments:
Post a Comment