"Cold Cases" -- civil rights, quality of investigations, Justice Dept motives, etc

My newspaper son, Peter (Mack), sent this NYT piece today.  It's a considerably more thoughtful article than we usually find in this  genre. 

When he sent this as part of a much longer letter, I commented on it:  "I am always somewhat ambivalent about those "cold cases."  Witnesses have often long since died, evidence becomes lost."  

In reading the piece, these concerns are mentioned  but plenty of questions are rightly raised as to why so many atrocity investigations "back in the day" were both laggard and virtually empty.  From my own experience and observation in the South, it was extremely difficult through most of the '60s to get meaningful Justice Department action.  The Feds often deferred to local law enforcement which, of course, was almost always, to put it mildly, extremely unreliable -- if not outrightly obstructionist.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/us/souths-cold-cases-reopened-but-still-unresolved.html?hp&_r=0

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
www.hunterbear.org 
(much social justice material)

See the new and expanded/updated edition of my "Organizer's 
Book." It's the inside story of the massive Jackson Movement,
bloody repression and murder, and more -- including a myriad
of organizing "lessons."  And with my new and 10,000 word
Introduction. http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm (". .a local activist's
 important account of the deleterious effects the involvement of 
national organizations can have on indigenous protest movements."
David Garrow in "The Age of the Unheralded", Progressive Magazine,
April 1990.

See my piece ON BEING A MILITANT AND RADICAL
ORGANIZER -- AND AN EFFECTIVE ONE:
http://crmvet.org/comm/hunter1.htm

The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
(Expanded in 2012. Photos. Material on our Native
background.)