IT’S ABOUT DAMN TIME: NEW LAW GIVES COLD CASE FAMILIES ANOTHER CHANCE FOR ANSWERS
OKLAHOMA (TUC) — It’s about damn time, y’all.
Senate Bill 1636 has officially been signed into law by Governor Kevin Stitt and will go into effect November 1st of this year.
Under this new law, families who have spent years waiting for answers in their loved one’s unsolved case will finally be able to ask for the case to be looked at all over again. And this time, by investigators who had nothing to do with the original investigation.
That means going back through the evidence, seeing if today’s DNA and forensic testing can find something that may have been missed or just wasn’t possible to test for back then at that point in time, and talking to witnesses all over again to see if there’s anything that could finally help move the case forward.
The law also puts a timeline on things. Once a family asks for their loved one’s case to be reviewed, law enforcement has 30 days to respond to them in writing. From there, investigators generally have six months to complete the review.
Families aren’t supposed to be left in the dark while all of this is happening either. They’ll have to be kept updated along the way, and once the review is finished, law enforcement will meet with the family to go over what they found and where things stand.
And as y’all know by now, we spend a lot of time digging into cold cases and telling the stories of families who are still waiting for answers years, and sometimes even decades later. We’ve seen firsthand how many questions can still be left when a case goes cold. We’ve also seen how hard these families fight to keep their loved one’s name and story alive.
Of course, no law can promise that every cold case will finally be solved. We really wish it could. But giving these families another chance to have the evidence looked at, witnesses talked to again, and questions revisited is a step in the right direction.
Most importantly, it reminds these families that their loved one has not been forgotten.
