The case for prosecuting Carolyn Bryant Donham was never strong.
This past week, the U.S. Justice Department admitted it for the second time.
Relatives of Emmett Till, whose adolescent freshness with Donham proved fatal in 1955, are disappointed. So probably are those who wanted the theater of bringing to trial a woman in her late 80s for one of the most notorious civil rights crimes in American history.
But it’s time to accept the fact that career prosecutors, both federal and state, during both Democratic and Republican administrations, have studied every angle of this case — and every law that might apply to it — and have concluded that bringing Donham to trial would either be futile or an abuse of the criminal justice system.
When the Justice Department reopened its investigation in 2017, the rationale for it seemed odd.
It cited as justification a newly published book that reported Donham acknowledging she lied on the witness stand during the trial of Till’s killers — her then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam. Even if she did lie, as most close followers of the case believe, it had no bearing on the outrageous outcome of the trial, since the all-white jury was not allowed by the judge to hear her testimony.
Those jurors, all men, were predisposed to acquit Till’s killers, and they didn’t need Donham’s testimony to provide cover of mollify their consciences. Their eyes were closed to the evidence by the unwritten but understood rule in the Jim Crow South that Black males, once they reached the age of puberty, were to steer clear of white women. Those 12 men were raised to defend a system that subjugated Blacks, even if that meant betraying an oath to render an impartial verdict.
To make Carolyn Donham, though, the scapegoat for the sins of that time would have been an injustice itself.
Whatever she is alleged to have done either could not be proven or could no longer be prosecuted.
If she perjured herself during that 1955 state trial, the deadline for prosecuting it expired in 1960, the Justice Department said. If she lied to the FBI when the feds first opened the case in 2004, the statute of limitations on that possible crime ran out in 2009.
A racially mixed Leflore County grand jury considered in 2007 whether she had been an accomplice in Till’s abduction or his subsequent murder. It looked at what the FBI had uncovered during its first investigation and concluded there was no solid evidence to prove she had a part in either crime.
The FBI reached the same conclusion in its second stab at the case.
That left the Justice Department with only one potential offense to prosecute: whether Donham lied to the FBI during its second investigation when she denied telling North Carolina historian Timothy Tyson that her 1955 testimony was largely fabricated. It was Tyson’s book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” published nine years after his 2008 interviews with Donham, that prompted the federal government to reopen the case in 2017.
The Justice Department’s press release sounded less than impressed with Tyson’s meticulousness as a researcher or his assumptions about what Donham was allegedly admitting to him.
“There is insufficient evidence to prove that she ever told the professor that any part of her testimony was untrue,” the press release reads. “Although the professor represented that he had recorded two interviews with her, he provided the FBI with only one recording, which did not contain any recantation. In addition, although an assistant transcribed the two recordings, neither transcript contained the alleged recantation. The professor also provided inconsistent explanations about whether the missing recording included the alleged recantation or whether, instead, the woman made the key admission before he began recording the interview.”
No matter how historically significant a civil rights case is, no matter how much of an injustice was done when the crime was first committed, modern-day prosecutors have an obligation to not let either of those considerations affect whether they pursue criminal charges. Their obligation is to look at the evidence as it exists today, to consider what witnesses are still living and how reliable their memories are, and to objectively consider what laws, if any, are applicable. Even if they conclude a crime was committed, they then have to weigh whether there is enough evidence to prove who committed that crime.
The prosecution fulfilled that obligation not just the second and third time it looked at the Till case. It did it the first time, too, when Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were put on trial.
It was a travesty of justice that a jury let the two of them get off. Another travesty was avoided by not bending the law or the facts to try to make Donham pay for it.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
