The legal and factual challenges in these decades-old matters are enormous, and we realize that few, if any, of these matters will be prosecutable. Department officials have conducted and continue to conduct extensive outreach to identify evidence and witnesses to enhance the Department's efforts to investigate and resolve these unsolved cold cases. This effort is coordinated and led by an accomplished 'cold case' prosecutor in the Civil Rights Division. The Civil Rights Division, in conjunction with United States Attorneys' Offices (USAOs) and the FBI, has focused significant time and resources to assess the prosecutability of more than 100 pending cold case matters. Since February of 2007, the FBI and the Division have partnered with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and the National Urban League to identify additional cases for investigation and to solicit their help.

result in death' that 'occurred not later than December 31, 1979.' Toward that end, each of the 56 FBI field offices searched their 'cold case files' to identify incidents which might be ripe for investigation. Pursuant to that Initiative and the passage of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act ('Emmett Till Act'), signed into law on October 8, 2008, and its Reauthorization, signed into law on December 16, 2016, the Department and the FBI are working together to address 'violations of criminal civil rights statutes. In 2006, the FBI began its ' Cold Case Initiative' - a comprehensive effort to identify and investigate racially-motivated murders committed decades ago.

Cold case files 2020