This was in the late 1990s, after one of the attackers, Herman Frank Cash, had already died. Cherry is accused in the bombing deaths of four young black girls in the 1963 explosion at the 16th Street Baptist Church. Jones was the prosecutor in the Bobby Frank Cherry murder trial. Prosecutor Doug Jones arriving at the Jefferson County Criminal Justice Center in Birmingham, Alabama, May 6, 2002. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama by President Bill Clinton, and was able to prosecute the case. By the time the government finally declassified the these files, Jones had been appointed a U.S. “The prosecution didn’t have access to all of the information that the FBI had collected immediately after the attack in the ‘60s.” Nevertheless, the overwhelming circumstantial evidence let to a conviction.Īlthough Jones was only a boy himself when the bombing happened, the government didn’t release the FBI’s evidence against these men for decades. The first one to be arrested (and convicted) was Robert Edward Chambliss in 1977-whose trial a young Doug Jones attended when he was in law school.Ĭhambliss “was prosecuted largely on circumstantial evidence,” Brasher says. For 14 years after the bombing, none of the men were prosecuted for their crime. Edgar Hoover was not exactly a proponent of the civil rights movement,” Brasher says.īy doing this, Hoover ensured that a court could not use them as evidence to prosecute the attackers, making it more difficult to convict. However, “the FBI under Hoover sealed those files away, because J. Edgar Hoover, knew the attackers’ names, and had even made secret recordings to prove it. Brasher, a history professor at the University of Alabama, the FBI determined that four KKK members had planted the bomb. 15, 1963: Denise McNair, 11 Carole Robertson, 14 Addie Mae Collins, 14 and Cynthia Wesley, 14. Victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing on Sept.
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