A white woman whose accusations prompted the lynching of black teenager Emmett Till will not face trial, an American grand jury has ruled.
Jurors in Leflore County in the Mississippi Delta, where the 14-year-old had travelled from Chicago in the summer of 1955, heard more than seven hours of testimony from investigators and witnesses.
The panel had been formed after an unserved arrest warrant for Carolyn Bryant Donham was found last month, 77 years after the killing.
Campaigners had pushed for the now 88-year-old to be prosecuted over her alleged role in the lynching.
Prosecutors said, the grand jury did not find sufficient evidence to indict Donham, on charges of kidnapping or manslaughter.
“After hearing every aspect of the investigation and evidence collected regarding Donham’s involvement, the grand jury returned a ‘no bill’ to the charges of both kidnapping and manslaughter,” W. Dewayne Richardson, the district attorney for the Fourth Circuit Court District of Mississippi, said.
The warrant was discovered by a five-member search group of the Emmett Till Foundation led by members of Till's family, including Deborah and her daughter Teri.
An image of the warrant, charged J.W. Milam, Roy Bryant and Bryant's then-wife - identified in the document as Mrs Roy Bryant - with kidnapping and orders their arrests.
It is dated August 29, 1955, and signed by the Leflore County Clerk.
Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he entered a shop where Donham, then 21, was working on August 24, 1955.
She set off the case by accusing the teenager of making improper advances at a family store in Money, Mississippi.
A cousin of Till who was there has said he whistled at the woman, which flew in the face of Mississippi's racist social codes of the era.
Till was kidnapped and brutally beaten by his killers.
Pictures of his body sent shockwaves around the world as his family insisted on an open casket funeral.
His murder spurred America’s civil rights movement.
