FBI Revisits Civil Rights Cold Cases

(CBS/AP)  The FBI has reopened investigations of about a dozen decades-old suspicious deaths, officials said Tuesday amid a Justice Department focus on cracking unsolved cases from the nation's civil rights era.

The high-priority cases, which FBI Director Robert S. Mueller described as numbering between 10 and 12, are among an estimated 100 that investigators nationwide are looking at as possible civil rights-related murders.

The murder of Oneal Moore is one such case. A black deputy sheriff in Louisiana, Moore was shot in his truck while on a routine patrol in June 1965, reports CBS News correspondent Bob Orr. The killers have never been caught.

"You would think that being a person in law enforcement, that that would have been a priority for law enforcement to find the person who was responsible," said Moore's brother, Ameal Moore.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales acknowledged that many of the cases may be far beyond the boundaries of what the federal government can legally prosecute. But they "remain on our radar," he said.

"Much time has passed on these crimes," Gonzales told reporters in Washington. "The wounds they left are deep, and still many of them have not healed. But we are committed to re-examining these cases and doing all we can to bring justice to the criminals who may have avoided punishment for so long."

Addressing civil rights violators, Gonzales said: "You have not gotten away with anything — we are still on your trail."

Officials declined to release details about which cases have been reopened, or where, but said that nearly all are located in 14 states in the South. Investigators later confirmed, for example, that the unsolved 1946 lynching of four sharecroppers on the Moore's Ford Bridge near Monroe, Ga., was among those being investigated.

But they declined to comment on whether another high-profile case was being included — that of Maceo Snipes, a black World War II veteran who in 1946 was shot in the back by four white men a day after he voted for the first time. No one was ever arrested in the killing, which happened in rural Georgia, about 90 miles south of Atlanta, and there is no evidence that a criminal probe in the case was ever opened.

The FBI's announcement came the same day that a grand jury looking into the 1955 slaying of Emmett Till — the black Chicago teenager who was killed in Mississippi after supposedly whistling at a white woman — refused to indict the woman.

The decision all but closes the books on a crime that helped give rise to the civil rights movement.

Many of the FBI's cases are also included on a list of 76 homicides suspected of being racially motivated that was compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Ala. Center president Richard Cohen said the government's renewed focus on the cold cases could help uncover what he called "a few burning embers."

"There are a lot of stones to turn over," Cohen said. "I think it would be wrong to give families false hope, but I think it would be right to say that people still care."

Mueller said the FBI began re-examining its old case files more than a year ago amid of spate of civil rights cases that investigators and prosecutors successfully solved.

Most recently, the Justice Department brought kidnapping and conspiracy charges last month against James Ford Seale, 71, in the 1964 abductions and murders of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee in southwest Mississippi. Seale has pleaded not guilty and is due for trial in April.