Even after the discovery of an arrest warrant and an unpublished memoir, the woman behind Emmett Till‘s lynching has yet again avoided prosecution.
A grand jury on Tuesday declined to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman who accused Emmett of making a pass at her in 1955, in Mississippi during the Jim Crow Era.
Leflore County district attorney Dewayne Richardson said the grand jury heard more than seven hours of testimony from investigators and witnesses last week and decided there wasn’t enough evidence to pursue charges against Donham.
Emmett’s family members had amplified their call for justice for the slain 14-year-old, bolstered by the kidnapping warrant they found in a Mississippi courthouse in late June. The grand jury considered both kidnapping and manslaughter charges. It was the fourth time since issuing the warrant nearly 70 years ago that authorities weighed prosecuting Donham. Each time, the evidence has come up short.
The Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., Emmett Till’s cousin and the last living witness to Till’s 1955 abduction, said the grand jury decision was “unfortunate, but predictable.”
“The prosecutor tried his best, and we appreciate his efforts, but he alone cannot undo hundreds of years of anti-Black systems that guaranteed those who killed Emmett Till would go unpunished, to this day,” Parker said in a statement. “The fact remains that the people who abducted, tortured, and murdered Emmett did so in plain sight, and our American justice system was and continues to be set up in such a way that they could not be brought to justice for their heinous crimes.”
