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1 1 (June 29, 2020)

handle is hein.crs/govdxzy0001 and id is 1 raw text is: or 101i -1 Overview of Recent Anti-Lynching Proposals June 29, 2020 Following the death of George Floyd in police custody in May and the fatal February shooting ofAhmaud Arbery, interest has heightened in legislation that would criminalize lynching-often described as death or bodily injury caused by two or more individuals acting w ithout legal authority. Anumber of states have enacted anti-lynching laws, as localized crimes like murder tend to be a subject of state, rather than federal law. Although the conduct criminalized under those state laws can implicate various federal laws, there is no federal law expressly governing lynching notwithstanding decades of legislative proposals on that front. In June, Members introduced two police reform bills-the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020 (Justice in Policing Act) and the Just and Unifying Solutions To Invigorate Communities Everywhere Act of 2020 (JUSTICE Act)-both of which include substantively identical sections that are described as anti-lynching provisions. These sections build on earlier legislation from this and other Congresses. Indeed, the anti-lynching provisions contained in the JUSTICEAct and the Justice in Policing Act are largely identical to the proscribed conduct in two bills that had already gained significant traction in the 116th Congress. One, the Justice for Victims of LynchingAct of 2019 (H.R. 3536, S. 488), passed the Senate on February 14, 2019. Anearly identical anti-lynching bill titled the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act (H.R. 35) passed the House on February 26, 2020. Similar attempts to enact federal anti-lynching laws did not achieve bicameral approval in the 115th Congress-a fate for approximately 200 anti-lynching proposals in the last century. For example, in 1918 Representative Leonidas Dyer of Missouri introduced an anti-lynching bill to remedy the refusal of states to prosecute the perpetrators of . .. lynchings under their own laws. Although Dyer's bill eventually passed the House of Representatives in 1922 ... it was ultimately blocked by filibuster in the Senate. Title IV of the Justice in Policing Act and Title IV of the JUSTICEAct would each create a new section of the federal criminal code entitled 'Lynching.' Both bills would make it a federal crime to conspire[] with another person to violate one of the following four federal hate crimes statutes: * 18 USC. 245, which, among other things, prohibits interference with an individual's participation in certain protected activity because of race, color, religion, or national origin; * 18 U.S.C. § 247, which prohibits conduct including certain destruction of religious real property because of the religious character of the property, or because of the race, color, or ethnic characteristics of the people associated with that property; Congressional ResearchService https://crsreports.congress.gov LSB10504 CRS Legal Siebar Prepared forMembers and Committee-sof Congress