UNITED
NATIONS - / www.MaximsNews.com, UN/ - 12
March 2007 -- Here’s the scenario that could have played out in a U.S.
Southern courtroom this summer: a 72-woman goes on trial for manslaughter in the
murder of a 14-year-old boy back in 1955.
And as a young woman
and former high school beauty queen, the would-be defendant was previously the
"victim" in the case in which she stands trial.
A compelling drama. a media bonanza – and a
highly flawed legal formulation. It’s not going to happen.
Carolyn Bryant, who said she was whistled at
by Emmett Till in her husband's grocery store in Money, Mississippi in 1955,
will not stand trial at a second legal proceeding to determine just who was
involved in the now-legendary lynching of the black boy from Chicago.
A Mississippi grand jury last week declined to
indict Bryant, thus disproving the courthouse adage that a grand jury will
indict a ham sandwich if a district attorney recommends it.
The Mississippi district attorney, Joyce
Chiles, sent a recommendation for a manslaughter indictment of Bryant to the
grand jury along with an exhaustive report on the case, but when the grand jury
went against her she wasn’t unhappy.
She said that if she’d been on the jury and
"followed the law," she would’ve said no to an indictment.
As a black woman for whom the buck stopped at
her desk following an FBI investigation of the "cold case" of Till’s
murder, Chiles was obviously under political pressure to recommend an
indictment.
A film on the case by Keith Beauchamp,
"The Untold Story of Emmett Till," made a strong case to hold someone
accountable even now for the 52-year-old crime.
Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s late husband, was
acquitted in the case along with his half-brother J.W. Milam back in 1955, and
Beauchamp and other Till advocates worked hard for years to get ultimate justice
and ultimate "closure" in what was probably the most significant
racial crime of the twentieth century.
Beauchamp went so far as to claim that as many
as fourteen people participated one way or another in the abduction and murder
of Till.
He was hard-pressed, though, to produce anyone
who was still alive other than Carolyn Bryant and a black man named Henry
Loggins.
And, indeed, those are the only two people
Chiles cited – at least publicly – as possible targets of indictment. (The
obvious problem with taking any legal action against Loggins was that whatever
he did or didn’t do that night in August, 1955, he was a poor black man under
the thumb of J.W. Milam, who along with Bryant did confess to killing Till to a
magazine writer after escaping a conviction at trial.)
Beauchamp, a Louisiana native who lives in
Brooklyn and got financial help from his parents to do the Till film – he’s
not an experienced filmmaker or investigator – was outraged by the grand
jury’s failure to indict, even though the tenuous case against Carolyn Bryant
was apparently based largely on someone’s claim they heard a female voice
among Till’s abductors.
But Beauchamp’s reputation was probably at
stake more than anyone involved in the case.
His film attracted considerable attention, and
he still makes frequent appearances on college campuses as the pre-eminent
expert on the case of his generation. (He's in his 30’s)
But Beauchamp was sometimes careless in his
claims about his findings, and his primary critic, Alabama historian David
Beito, took him to task following the grand jury’s decision for raising
expectations of a Till indictment.
In Beauchamp’s defense, though, he did
yeoman investigative work, uncovering, he said, a legal document that indicated
the authorities actually considered indicting Carolyn Bryant in 1955.
District Attorney Chiles has declined to turn
over the voluminous FBI files in the case – which she used in deciding whether
to seek an indictment – but if Beauchamp is correct about the existence of
such a document it may have been a factor in the continued pursuit of Carolyn
Bryant.
Among those who were critical of the grand
jury’s decision, there were murmurings about perhaps re-opening the case again
if new evidence emerges.
Talk about wishful thinking.
The FBI’s investigative account was
reportedly 8,000 pages long. The Till case has been probed and picked at like
few other cases in American history. It’s over, I’m afraid.
To me, this is almost a relief. I’ve worked
on the case on and off for four years, and my journalistic interest in it goes
back to 1994, when I interviewed Roy Bryant in Ruleville, Mississippi, shortly
before he died.
Given the passage of time, the legal
realities, and the differences between the Till case and other Southern racial
atrocities that have been successfully prosecuted in recent years, I find it
hard to retain any emotional investment in an indictment.
The death of Emmett Till was re-examined
closely by journalists and scholars on the fiftieth anniversary of the case in
2005. The FBI produced its report. The district attorney did what she had to do.
The process of retrospective exploration of this tragedy has played itself out.
This does not mean historians will cease to
examine Till’s murder. It does mean the Till case has come to the end of the
road in the American criminal justice system.
~~~~~~
David
Holmberghas
covered major stories for newspapers in New York, Washington, Miami,
Philadelphia and other cities for 30 years. He currently teaches journalism at Drew University and is a
Contributor to MaximsNews.com.
He
has been a senior editor for The Village Voice, where he covered the
investigation of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination. He has written
about the Emmett Till Case for The Nation, Newsday, The Daily News, and The
Palm Beach (Fla.) Post.
~~~~~
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