WEEKLY TOPIC: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT READING: VOCABULARY RELATED WITH CRIME. 14-04-2011.

(CBS News)  

Five years ago, the FBI announced that it was reopening more than 100 unsolved murder cases from the civil rights era of the 1950s and 60s. The goal of the "Cold Case Initiative" was to try and mete out justice in what seemed to be racially motivated killings that were never prosecuted.

Not many 50-year-old cold cases ever get solved - memories fade, evidence is lost, witnesses and suspects die or disappear. But that's not the case in the death of Louis allen, a mostly forgotten, but historically significant murder that helped bring thousands of white college students to Mississippi in the Freedom Summer of 1964.

Reporting on an unsolved murder
Forty seven years after the murder of Louis Allen, "60 Minutes" goes to Liberty, Miss. in search of his killer.

The murder is still unsolved, but the case has never quite gone away, because the chief suspect is very much alive and walking the streets of a town called Liberty.

Liberty, Miss. is a small rural logging town not far from the Louisiana border. The FBI believes that some people there have been keeping a dark secret for nearly 50 years, from one of the ugliest periods in the state's history.

It was a time when civil rights activists were beaten and arrested, when state, and local politics were controlled by all-white citizens' councils, and when people like Louis Allen were murdered in cold blood and without redress.

SOURCE: CBS NEWS.