Shabnam Karimkhani spent Thanksgiving break sitting in the National Archives in Maryland, holding old FBI files in her hands. The documents, in original form with handwritten notes from 40 years ago, focused on racially motivated killings from the civil rights era that had never been solved.

Just holding the documents felt surreal, Karimkhani said.

‘For me the biggest thing that kind of hit home (is) they have all this information, and they have all these leads, how is it that nothing happened?’ she said.

Karimkhani is a second-year law student at Syracuse University’s College of Law. She is the office coordinator for the Cold Case Justice Initiative, a group of about 25 students formed to re-examine unsolved murder cases from the civil rights era.

Professors Paula Johnson and Janis McDonald began the CCJI in 2007 based on a request to help investigate the 1964 murder of Frank Morris in Louisiana. Morris’ family approached the two civil rights era experts, and they began working on the case with a reporter from The Concordia Sentinelin Louisiana.

After almost four years of searching through documents and putting together facts, the CCJI released information on Jan. 12 on a new potential suspect in the Morris killing. Now it’s ‘squarely for the law enforcement officials to take the next logical step,’ Johnson said.

In addition to the Morris case, the CCJI is handling about 30 cases, all at different stages. As the CCJI garnered attention, more families began approaching the group to investigate old killings that had been pushed aside. The FBI also has a published list of unsolved cases.

The justice

One case Karimkhani is working on focuses on a black man who was chased through Arkansas by a group of white men after allegedly making an offensive remark to a white female. The men shot him in the leg, and a doctor in the area refused to give him care. He died a few days later. The local law enforcement agencies at the time deemed it a ‘justifiable killing’ because the man had allegedly done something wrong by speaking to the white woman. Many of the cases were handled this way at the time.

Karimkhani’s excursion to the National Archives in search of files was the group’s second trip. On the first trip, in the summer of 2009, McDonald, Johnson and a few students sifted through files and found over 7,000 unredacted FBI documents. The CCJI files Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain the FBI documents. Finding unredacted files is rare, McDonald said, and means that the FBI hadn’t utilized the documents related to the killings. The cases had been ‘cold’ for so long that those vital documents needed to solve them weren’t deemed as important anymore.

But for the families involved, the cases aren’t cold at all.

‘You meet these families in person, and you realize they don’t know what happened to their brother or their sister or mother or nephew,’ Karimkhani said. ‘For me it’s an inspiration, and it just keeps me going.’

The students involved help with all stages of the investigation. Emily Schneider, a first-year law student came to SU specifically to join the CCJI. She, along with the other first years, spends time reading through the 7,000 documents and indexing them.

From FBI reports to memoirs to notes from secret informants, the students have access to once-confidential, detailed information. And all of those documents had been forgotten until the CCJI rediscovered them.

‘All of these atrocities occurred that no one really paid attention to, and no one bothered to find out more details,’ Schneider said.

Afua Quayenortey, a second-year law student, said the investigations require out-of-the-box thinking because many of the documents are missing or don’t have enough information. From old police reports to archived newspapers to calling government agencies, the students must look everywhere they can to tie those loose ends together.

‘A lot of it has to do with talking with people,’ Quayenortey said. ‘You need to see a pattern, and when you do see that pattern, you think, ‘OK, what do I do with this?”

The initiative

The students involved are expected to volunteer for at least two hours per week. But many put in much more than the required time.

Lauren Neal is a second-year law student. She attended a CCJI meeting in her first week at the College of Law because she thought it sounded cool and interesting. She began her first year as all students do: indexing files. Now the research coordinator for the CCJI, she spent the summer in Georgia working in a law office sorting through more documents.

She spent all summer in a 7-by-7 office in a law building stacked high with text from congressional hearings. That, along with the chance to meet affected family members last February, shifted Neal’s motivations for her involvement in the CCJI. She went from simply looking for an extracurricular activity to seriously wanting to help people find out what happened to their families.

Hearing the ways mothers, fathers, sisters, cousins and family members have been affected by the unsolved death of a loved one made Neal’s motivations more personal.

‘It changed my perspective on what (I) thought about these cases, and it made me really want to make a difference and try to seek justice, whatever that is, in each individual case,’ Neal said.

The developments in the Morris case mark the first breaks in a case that will likely lead to legal action, Johnson said. The students and professors have theories and leads on many other cases, and they hope this marks the start of bringing justice to many more families.

And although holding the FBI files and having access to once-confidential documents is exciting and rare, many of the students participate for more than a chance to build their resume. It’s a chance to use those documents to do something the FBI and other law enforcement agencies never did: solve the cases.

‘When the community trusts us, they come forward with more information,’ McDonald said. ‘It’s the kind of generosity and support and recognition that this is making a difference that matters.’

kronayne@syr.edu

Published on January 23, 2011 at 12:00 pm