Civil Rights Cold Case Bill Extends Review Board to 11 Years, Removes Privacy Shield for Pre-1990 Records

This legislation, titled the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Reauthorization Act, is all about opening up the history books on unsolved civil rights-era crimes. The main goal is transparency: it states Congress’s view that all government records related to these cold cases should be presumed available for immediate public release. To make sure the Review Board tasked with collecting these documents has enough time to finish the job, the bill extends its tenure from seven years to eleven years. It also gives state and local governments a financial break by requiring the Review Board to fully reimburse them for the costs of digitizing, photocopying, or mailing these records to the National Archivist.

Clearing the Path for Transparency

One of the biggest changes here involves getting local governments to hand over the files. The original 2018 law had an exception that allowed state or local governments to hold back some records. This bill removes that exception entirely (Section 3(a)(2)(A)(i)), essentially making the transmission of these civil rights cold case records mandatory. This means if your local police department or county courthouse has a file the Review Board wants, they can’t use that old loophole to keep it locked away. The good news for those local governments is that they’ll get reimbursed for the administrative costs of compliance, which helps offset the burden of digging up and copying decades-old files.

The Privacy Trade-Off

The most critical detail for everyday people involves a specific change to privacy protections. Under current law, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) includes an exemption (5 U.S.C. 552(b)(6)) that protects personal information—like names, addresses, or medical details—from public release if it would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy. This bill explicitly amends the law to state that this privacy exemption does not apply to information contained in any civil rights cold case record created on or before January 1, 1990.

Think about what that means in practice: If a record from 1985 contains sensitive information about a witness, a victim, or even someone peripherally involved in a case—say, their medical history or a personal statement—that information loses its current statutory privacy shield just because it’s old. While this provision drastically helps historians and researchers seeking full transparency, it creates a real concern for individuals whose personal, potentially sensitive information is contained in those decades-old government files. They might suddenly find their details released publicly without the standard privacy review process.

Extended Time for the Review Board

Finally, the bill grants the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board four extra years to complete its mission, extending the term from seven to eleven years (Section 3). This extension acknowledges the massive undertaking of collecting and reviewing records from across the country, ensuring the Board has the necessary runway to thoroughly examine the documents and make determinations about their public release, even with the new mandates for mandatory transmission and the removal of certain privacy barriers.