The report accuses the lady whose claims resulted in the Black teenager’s murder of kidnapping him. She is still alive, and the warrant was never served.

The unserved warrant accusing a white woman in his 1955 kidnapping was discovered by a team searching the basement of a Mississippi courthouse for evidence about the lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till. The victim’s family, who started the search, now wants authorities to finally arrest the woman nearly 70 years after the crime.

The Leflore county circuit clerk, Elmus Stockstill, told the Associated Press (AP) on Wednesday that a warrant for Carolyn Bryant Donham’s arrest was found inside a file folder that had been put in a box last week. Donham is listed as “Mrs. Roy Bryant” on the warrant.

He claimed that records are organized into boxes by decade, but the 29 August 1955 warrant and any other relevant documents were nowhere to be found.

“They narrowed it down between the 50s and 60s and got lucky,” said Stockstill, who certified the warrant as genuine.

The Emmett Till Legacy Foundation launched the search, which involved two members of Till’s family: her cousin Deborah Watts, who serves as the Foundation’s executive director, and her daughter Teri Watts. They want the warrant to be used by law enforcement to detain Donham, who was married to one of the two white men who were tried and found not guilty just weeks after Till was kidnapped from a relative’s house, killed, and dumped into a river at the time of the murder.

“Serve it and charge her,” Teri Watts told the AP in an interview.

By accusing the 14-year-old Till of making inappropriate approaches at a family store in Money, Mississippi, Donham launched the prosecution in August 1955. According to a cousin of Till who was present, Till whistled at the woman, which was against the time’s racial social mores in Mississippi.

Evidence indicates a woman, possibly Donham identified Till with the men who later killed him. At the time, Donham’s arrest warrant was made public, but the sheriff of Leflore county told reporters he did not want to “bother” the woman because she had two young children to take care of.

Donham, who is currently in her 80s and most recently resided in North Carolina, has not responded publicly to requests for her arrest. Teri Watts, however, stated that the Till family considers the warrant charging Donham with kidnapping to be new evidence.

“This is what the state of Mississippi needs to go ahead,” she said.

Dewayne Richardson, the district attorney whose office would bring a case, would comment on the warrant but highlighted a December report from the justice department regarding the Till case, which stated that no prosecution was possible.

Contacted by the AP on Wednesday, Leflore county sheriff Ricky Banks said: “This is the first time I’ve known about a warrant.”

Banks, who was seven years old when Till was killed, said “nothing was said about a warrant” when a former district attorney investigated the case five or six years ago.

“I will see if I can get a copy of the warrant and get with the DA and get their opinion on it,” Banks said. If the warrant can still be served, Banks said, he would have to talk to law enforcement officers in the state where Donham resides.

Arrest warrants can “go stale” due to the passage of time and changing circumstances, and one from 1955 almost certainly would not pass muster before a court, even if a sheriff agreed to serve it, said Ronald J Rychlak, a law professor at the University of Mississippi.

But combined with any new evidence, the original arrest warrant “absolutely” could be an important stepping stone toward establishing probable cause to initiate a new prosecution, he said.

“If you went in front of a judge you could say, ‘Once upon a time a judge determined there was probable cause, and much more information is available today,’” Rychlak said.

On August 24, 1955, Till, a Chicago native who was visiting family in Mississippi, walked into the store where Donham, who was 21 at the time, was employed. Wheeler Parker, a Till ancestor who was present, told AP that Till whistled at the woman. Donham said in court that Till grabbed her as well and said something inappropriate.

Two nights later, in search of the young man, Donham’s then-husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother JW Milam arrived with weapons at the remote Leflore county house of Till’s great-uncle, Mose Wright. Days later, in a different county, a fan-weighed body belonging to Till, who had been brutalized, was retrieved from a river.

His mother opened the coffin so Chicago mourners could see what had transpired, which sparked the growing civil rights movement at the time.

Despite being cleared of murder, Bryant and Milam eventually acknowledged the crime in a magazine article. Despite the fact that both men were included in the same warrant that charged Donham with kidnapping, the matter was dropped once they were cleared.

During the murder trial, Wright testified that Till was kidnapped from the family home by individuals who had voices that were “lighter” than a man’s. According to other evidence in FBI archives, Donham informed her husband earlier that evening that at least two other Black guys were not the correct choice.

Source: dailymail.co.uk