Today on NPR they mentioned the killing of Emmett Till, a black kid from Chicago who went to Money, Mississippi to visit some relatives. (This was 1955). While there he made the mistake of whistling at a white woman, which resulted in her husband torturing and killing young Mr. Till. The husband and his brother were charged with murder, but an all-white jury acquitted the men after only a few minutes of deliberation. Both men had claimed to be innocent.
A year or two later both admitted to a reporter for Look magazine that they had killed the kid. Both men lived more or less normal lives after that.
So my question is why were these two re-tried? As I understand it, the double jeopardy laws prohibits the state from re-prosecuting someone based on the same evidence that was presented during the first trial. If these two guys confessed, seems like that would be a pretty big piece of new evidence.
Why not try to prosecute them again? One if them lived until the mid-90’s, seems that even if the failure to re-try these guys can be chalked up to Mississippi in the 1950’s, at some point someone would open a case again based on their confession.
What am I missing?