Criminal Justice and Policing

A new report by Mississippi‑based civil rights group JULIAN claims that at least 70 deaths of Black Americans across seven Southern states from 2000 to 2025 were likely 'modern‑day lynchings' that local authorities ruled suicides or accidents, potentially cutting off homicide investigations and masking racist violence. The Crimson Record, released last month, catalogs cases in Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Alabama and says the total could exceed 100 when other suspicious deaths are included, with Mississippi alone accounting for 20. JULIAN founder Jill Collen Jefferson argues that once a death is labeled a suicide, police almost never pursue it as a possible killing and families lose avenues for justice, pointing to hangings such as Jermaine Carter in Greenwood, Miss., and Rodney Thompson in Memphis that families have long disputed. The report is being applied to recent cases like that of Kyle Bassinga, found hanging in a Cobb County, Georgia park in February; police there say they see 'no indicators' of another person’s involvement and are treating it as a suicide while warning about online misinformation, but Jefferson says the physical circumstances demand a homicide lens from the outset. Outside experts quoted note that disputes over classification of Black deaths go back to the era of documented racial‑terror lynchings, arguing that while the forms of violence change, the dynamics of terror and institutional blind spots can persist into the present.