question: Why weren't there any convictions for Emmett Till's murder?
comment: Double jeopardy says that you cannot be subjected to the same trial twice. If your question is "why is double jeopardy important," well, that's a matter of opinion; but the rationale is that a hostile government could subject a person to trial for the same crime over and over again otherwise. As for why there was no further prosecution, well, this was 1950s Mississippi. Memorials to Till are still being defaced and destroyed *today*, and that's in our supposedly enlightened modern times. In the 50s sympathy for a murdered black child was far, far less.
passages: Till's murder was the focus of a 1957 television episode for the "U.S. Steel Hour" titled "Noon on Doomsday" written by Rod Serling. He was fascinated by how quickly Mississippi whites supported Bryant and Milam. Although the script was rewritten to avoid mention of Till, and did not say that the murder victim was black, White Citizens' Councils vowed to boycott U.S. Steel. The eventual episode bore little resemblance to the Till case.
   In 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it was reopening the case to determine whether anyone other than Milam and Bryant was involved. David T. Beito, a professor at the University of Alabama, states that Till's murder "has this mythic quality like the Kennedy assassination". The DOJ had undertaken to investigate numerous cold cases dating to the Civil Rights Movement, in the hope of finding new evidence in other murders as well.
   BULLET::::- In Meridian, Mississippi, federal judge W. Harold Cox dismissed the felony indictments against 17 of the 18 men accused of the 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, finding insufficient evidence of a conspiracy to deprive the victims of their rights. Misdemeanor charges remained in place for Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey, Deputy Cecil Price, and a city policeman, Richard Willis, for "participating in a conspiracy under color of law to inflict summary punishment". The case would be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and proceed as "United States v. Price". Seven defendants would eventually be convicted and would receive federal prison terms ranging from 3 to 10 years.
   In 1955, when Emmett was fourteen, his mother put him on the train to spend the summer visiting his cousins in Money, Mississippi. She never saw him alive again. Her son was abducted and brutally murdered on August 28, 1955, after being accused of interacting inappropriately with a white woman. The following month, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam faced trial for Till's kidnapping and murder but were acquitted by the all-white jury after a five-day trial and a 67-minute deliberation. One juror said, "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long." Only months later, in an interview with "Look" magazine in 1956, protected against double jeopardy, Bryant and Milam admitted to killing Emmett Till.
   Section::::Media discourse.
  
  Newspapers in major international cities and religious, and socialist publications reported outrage about the verdict and strong criticism of American society. Southern newspapers, particularly in Mississippi, wrote that the court system had done its job. Till's story continued to make the news for weeks following the trial, sparking debate in newspapers, among the NAACP and various high-profile segregationists about justice for blacks and the propriety of Jim Crow society.
   Bryant and Milam were indicted for murder. The state's prosecuting attorney, Hamilton Caldwell, was not confident that he could get a conviction in a case of white violence against a black male accused of insulting a white woman. A local black paper was surprised at the indictment and praised the decision, as did the "New York Times." The high-profile comments published in Northern newspapers and by the NAACP were of concern to the prosecuting attorney, Gerald Chatham; he worried that his office would not be able to secure a guilty verdict, despite the compelling evidence. Having limited funds, Bryant and Milam initially had difficulty finding attorneys to represent them, but five attorneys at a Sumner law firm offered their services "pro bono." Their supporters placed collection jars in stores and other public places in the Delta, eventually gathering $10,000 for the defense.
   The 1987 "Eyes on the Prize", a 14-hour Emmy award-winning documentary, begins with the murder of Emmett Till. Accompanying written materials for the series, "Eyes on the Prize" and "Voices of Freedom" (for the second time period), exhaustively explore the major figures and events of the Civil Rights Movement. Stephen Whitaker states that, as a result of the attention Till's death and the trial received,
   BULLET::::- Guilty verdicts were returned against Neshoba County, Mississippi Deputy Sheriff Cecil R. Price and six other defendants for violations of federal civil rights laws in connection with the 1965 murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Another eight defendants were acquitted, including Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey. The trial was held before an all-white jury in the U.S. District Court in Meridian. The defendants received sentences ranging between three and ten years in prison.
   In October 1955, one month after Emmett Till's abductors and murderers had been acquitted of the murder, the fate ten years earlier of Louis Till was made public for all to know (even though his military record had been confidential). The effect was to smear the reputation of young dead Emmett by associating him with the crimes for which his father had been executed. In November 1955, one month later, a grand jury declined to indict the two abductors for kidnapping Till, despite the testimony given that they had in fact admitted kidnapping him.
   That same year, PBS aired an installment of "American Experience" titled "The Murder of Emmett Till." In 2005, CBS journalist Ed Bradley aired a "60 Minutes" report investigating the Till murder, part of which showed him tracking down Carolyn Bryant at her home in Greenville, Mississippi.
   Photos of the decaying and mutilated body flooded newspapers, putting the case on the map both nationally and internationally. The two men accused of his murder were acquitted after a short five-day trial with an all-white male jury where the possibility of justice was made a mockery of. Shortly afterward, the defendants sold their story to journalists detailing how they carried out the murder. The Emmett Till case was a significant motivator of the Civil Rights Movement, and the Montgomery bus boycott began three months after his body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River
  
  Section::::Awards.
   The defense moved for a retrial and, believing the defendants innocent, Judge James Edwin Horton agreed to set aside the guilty verdict for Patterson. Horton ruled the rest of defendants could not get a fair trial at that time and indefinitely postponed the rest of the trials, knowing it would cost him his job when he ran for re-election.
   Forty-one years after the murders, weeks before Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of manslaughter in the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, David Ridgen convinced Thomas Moore, older brother of Charles, to return to Mississippi to seek justice for his brother and Henry Dee. Moore had already been investigating the case.
   County Sheriff Flake Chambliss became focused on two suspects: Claude Neal, a 23-year-old black farmworker who lived about a quarter mile away, and Calvin Cross, who was white. Sheriff Chambliss had received reports that Neal had been in the field near the same water pump that Lola had gone to and that he was gone for about two hours before going home. Neal and Cannady had known each other since childhood; there were some suggestions that they were lovers. Neal was arrested about two hours after the discovery of Cannady's body.
   BULLET::::- March 5 – In Camden, Tennessee, country music star Patsy Cline (Virginia Patterson Hensley) is killed in a plane crash along with fellow performers Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas, and Cline's manager and pilot Randy Hughes, while returning from a benefit performance in Kansas City, Kansas for country radio disc jockey "Cactus" Jack Call.
  
  BULLET::::- March 18 – "Gideon v. Wainwright": The Supreme Court rules that state courts are required to provide counsel in criminal cases for defendants who cannot afford to pay their own attorneys.
   Mose Wright stayed on his front porch for twenty minutes waiting for Till to return. He did not go back to bed. He and another man went into Money, got gasoline, and drove around trying to find Till. Unsuccessful, they returned home by 8:00 am. After hearing from Wright that he would not call the police because he feared for his life, Curtis Jones placed a call to the Leflore County sheriff, and another to his mother in Chicago. Distraught, she called Emmett's mother Mamie Till Bradley. Wright and his wife Elizabeth drove to Sumner, where Elizabeth's brother contacted the sheriff.
   BULLET::::- A Ku Klux Klansman, who had been charged with the 1965 murder of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo, was acquitted by a jury in Hayneville, Alabama. Eugene Thomas, who had been sentenced to ten years in prison on a federal court conviction of conspiracy to violate the civil rights of participants in the Selma to Montgomery marches, was found not guilty by a state jury of eight African-Americans and four whites. Alabama Attorney General Richmond Flowers, Sr. had prosecuted the case personally, but had elected not to call the state's two star witnesses.
   As one of the few black lawyers in Georgia, Walden frequently worked with the national legal team of the NAACP, led by Thurgood Marshall, when the organization became involved in a civil rights case. In 1948, while in communication with the NAACP, Walden did not get directly involved in the case of the lynching of Robert Mallard in Lyons, Georgia, as his widow had already hired an attorney. Rather than pursuing what had been described as a white mob that stopped the Mallard car and shot Mr. Mallard, the local sheriff arrested Mrs. Mallard on suspicion of murder. At the national level, the NAACP added the local law officials' inadequate investigation to its argument for federal anti-lynching legislation.
   The day before the start of the trial, a young black man named Frank Young arrived to tell Howard he knew of two witnesses to the crime. Levi "Too Tight" Collins and Henry Lee Loggins were black employees of Leslie Milam, J. W.'s brother, in whose shed Till was beaten. Collins and Loggins were spotted with J. W. Milam, Bryant, and Till. The prosecution team was unaware of Collins and Loggins. Sheriff Strider, however, booked them into the Charleston, Mississippi jail to keep them from testifying.
   BULLET::::- The same year, Georgia congressman John Lewis sponsored a bill to provide a plan for investigating and prosecuting unsolved (cold case) Civil Rights-era murders. The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act was signed into law in 2008.
  
  BULLET::::- The Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, site of the 1955 trial of Till's killers, was restored and re-opened in 2012. The Emmett Till Interpretive Center opened across the street and is also serving as a community center.
   After Till went missing, a three-paragraph story was printed in the "Greenwood Commonwealth" and quickly picked up by other Mississippi newspapers. They reported on his death when the body was found. The next day, when a picture of him his mother had taken the previous Christmas showing them smiling together appeared in the "Jackson Daily News" and "Vicksburg Evening Post", editorials and letters to the editor were printed expressing shame at the people who had caused Till's death. One read, "Now is the time for every citizen who loves the state of Mississippi to 'Stand up and be counted' before hoodlum white trash brings us to destruction." The letter said that Negroes were not the downfall of Mississippi society, but whites like those in White Citizens' Councils that condoned violence.
   BULLET::::- In the case of "United States v. Price", the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that federal civil rights criminal chargers were not limited to "officers of the State" (state and local government officials), but applied also to any "willful participant in joint activity with the State or its agents". Indictments of 15 of the 18 persons charged with conspiracy to the 1964 murder civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goldman and James Chaney in Neshoba County, Mississippi, had been dismissed because they had been private individuals. That evening, with the indictments of defendants in other cases now upheld, the FBI arrested 13 members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Jones County, Mississippi for the January killing of Vernon Dahmer.
   As of 2015, only one of these several cases had made it to court and resulted in a successful prosecution. This was the case of Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was fatally shot in Alabama in 1964 by James Fowler, a state police officer. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and served six months in prison.
   Because the case of Haywood Patterson had been dismissed due to the technical failure to appeal it on time, it presented different issues. Attorneys Osmond Frankel and Walter Pollak argued those.
  
  On April 1, 1935, the United States Supreme Court sent the cases back a second time for retrials in Alabama.
   While the trial progressed, Leflore County Sheriff George Smith, Howard, and several reporters, both black and white, attempted to locate Collins and Loggins. They could not, but found three witnesses who had seen Collins and Loggins with Milam and Bryant on Leslie Milam's property. Two of them testified that they heard someone being beaten, blows, and cries. One testified so quietly the judge ordered him several times to speak louder; he said he heard the victim call out, "Mama, Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy." Judge Curtis Swango allowed Carolyn Bryant to testify, but not in front of the jury, after the prosecution objected that her testimony was irrelevant to Till's abduction and murder. It may have been leaked in any case to the jury. Sheriff Strider testified for the defense his theory that Till was alive, and that the body retrieved from the river was white. A doctor from Greenwood stated on the stand that the body was too decomposed to identify, and therefore had been in the water too long for it to be Till.
  
raw_presuppositions: Someone should have been convited for Emmett Till's murder.
raw_corrections: Someone was tried and let go, you cannot be tried twice for the same crime. 