WASHINGTON - A new Justice Department office would investigate and prosecute "cold case" murders from the civil rights era, under a measure approved by the Senate on Wednesday.
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 who was 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.
David Jordan, a state senator from Leflore County and Greenwood councilman, praised the federal legislative move at a Wednesday night Greenwood Voters League meeting. He particularly noted the bipartisan effort as "a coalition working together and not letting party take over."
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 jail for the slayings of three civil rights workers in 1964.
Killen was the latest in a string of elderly suspects tried and convicted for decades-old crimes committed at a time when justice was out of reach for many American blacks.
The new office has been compared to Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which focuses on finding and deporting former Nazis living in the United States.
The bill authorizes up to $5 million a year for the unit to investigate and try cases, working together with state and local law enforcement officials. If a crime other than murder is discovered, it would be referred to the criminal section of the Justice Department's civil rights division.
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