Would Ben Shapiro have acquitted Emmett Till’s killers?

In the blood-stained century of Jim Crow, thousands of black men, women and children fell victim to racist terror. Often they died anonymously — buried in shallow graves, tossed into rivers, blotted from the earth without so much as a mention in the paper — and so too would have Emmett Till had his mother not held an open casket funeral, forcing the nation to confront the horror that had so long played out down South in obscurity.

The national outrage sparked by the gruesome sight of the 14-year-old’s mutilated face forced local authorities to bring Till’s killers to trial—something unheard of in a stronghold of white supremacy like 1950s Mississippi. Just fifteen days before Till’s murder, civil rights activist Lamar Smith had been assassinated on the lawn of the Brookhaven courthouse in front of a sheriff. The killers were arrested, then swiftly let go.

Of course, the trial was a farce. After hearing five days of testimony and deliberating for a little more than an hour, the jury acquitted Till’s murderers in spite of overwhelming evidence. Although the outcome was a forgone conclusion from the start, the lawyers still had to go through the motions.

The defense’s main strategy was to cast “reasonable” doubt on whether the body could be positively identified as Till’s. It had been in the…