Homicide Victims' Families' Rights Act

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE <CFR>28 CFR Part 95</CFR> <DEPDOC>[Docket No. OAG 182; AG Order No. 6144-2025]</DEPDOC> <RIN>RIN 1105-AB70</RIN> <SUBJECT>Homicide Victims' Families' Rights Act</SUBJECT> <HD SOURCE="HED">AGENCY:</HD> Office of the Attorney General, Department of Justice. <HD SOURCE="HED">ACTION:</HD> Proposed rule. <SUM> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUMMARY:</HD> The Department of Justice is proposing a rule to implement the Homicide Victims' Families' Rights Act of 2021. The proposed rule would explain and effectuate the Act's system for reviewing and, as warranted, reinvestigating murders investigated by Federal law enforcement agencies that remain unsolved after three years. </SUM> <EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">DATES:</HD> Written and electronic comments must be sent or submitted on or before March 24, 2025. Comments received by mail will be considered timely if they are postmarked on or before the last day of the comment period. The electronic Federal Docket Management System will accept electronic comments until midnight eastern time at the end of that day. </EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">ADDRESSES:</HD> Comments may be mailed to Regulations Docket Clerk, Office of Legal Policy, U.S. Department of Justice, 950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Room 4234, Washington, DC 20530. To ensure proper handling, please reference RIN 1105-AB70 or Docket No. OAG 182 on your correspondence. You may submit comments electronically or view an electronic version of this proposed rule at <E T="03">http://www.regulations.gov.</E> <FURINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:</HD> David J. Karp, Senior Counsel, Office of Legal Policy, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, DC, 202-514-3273. </FURINF> <SUPLINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:</HD> <HD SOURCE="HD1">I. Public Participation</HD> Posting of Public Comments. Interested persons are invited to participate in this rulemaking by submitting written data, views, or arguments on all aspects of this rule via one of the methods and by the deadline stated above. The Department of Justice (“Department”) also invites comments that relate to the economic, environmental, or federalism effects that might result from this rule. Comments that will provide the most assistance to the Department in developing these procedures will reference a specific portion of the rule, explain the reason for any recommended change, and include data, information, or authority that support such recommended change. Please note that all comments received are considered part of the public record and made available for public inspection at <E T="03">http://www.regulations.gov.</E> Such information includes personally identifying information (“PII”) (such as your name, address, etc.). Interested persons are not required to submit their PII in order to comment on this rule. However, any PII that is submitted is subject to being posted to the publicly accessible website at <E T="03">http://www.regulations.gov</E> without redaction. If you want to submit confidential business information as part of your comment but do not want it to be posted online, you must include the phrase “CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS INFORMATION” in the first paragraph of your comment. You must also prominently identify confidential business information to be redacted within the comment. If a comment has so much confidential business information that it cannot be effectively redacted, all or part of that comment may not be posted on <E T="03">http://www.regulations.gov.</E> Confidential business information identified and located as set forth above will not be placed in the public docket file. The Department may withhold from public viewing information provided in comments that it determines may impact the privacy of an individual or is offensive. For additional information, please read the Privacy Act notice that is available via the link in the footer of <E T="03">http://www.regulations.gov.</E> To inspect the agency's public docket file in person, you must make an appointment with the agency. Please see the <E T="02">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT</E> paragraph above for agency contact information. <HD SOURCE="HD1">II. Overview</HD> The Homicide Victims' Families' Rights Act of 2021 (“Act” or “HVFRA”), which was enacted on August 3, 2022, Public Law 117-164, 136 Stat. 1358, provides a system for the review of case files, and for carrying out further investigation as warranted, in murder cases investigated by Federal law enforcement agencies that have gone unsolved for over three years. The general objective of the Act is to facilitate the identification of the perpetrators of these “cold case” murders and thereby help to bring the perpetrators to justice and provide closure for the victims' families. The Act specifically provides for carrying out case file reviews in cold case murder investigations on application by certain family members of the victim, and for further investigation if the case file review concludes that a full reinvestigation would result in probative investigative leads. The Act also directs the collection and publication of statistics on the number of cold case murders and reports to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees on the operation and results of the system established by the Act. This proposed rule would add a new part 95 to title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations to implement the Act. The new part would explain the Act's requirements and key concepts, and it would specify assignments of responsibility and procedures to ensure that the Act is effectively carried out. <HD SOURCE="HD1">III. Legal Authority</HD> The Department of Justice is issuing this rule pursuant to the HVFRA and the authority of the Attorney General under Executive Order 11396, 33 FR 2689 (Feb. 7, 1968). <HD SOURCE="HD1">IV. Section-by-Section Analysis</HD> The proposed rule would provide a statement of purpose in § 95.1 and define key terms in § 95.2. Section 95.3 would explain what is required in cold case murder file reviews. Section 95.4 would set out procedures for victims' family members to apply for file reviews and for action on the applications by the responsible investigative agencies. Section 95.5 would explain the Act's requirements relating to full reinvestigations. Section 95.6 would direct that case file reviews and reinvestigations be carried out in a cohesive manner when multiple agencies are involved. Section 95.7 would address consulting with and informing applicants, and keeping them up to date about case file reviews and reinvestigations. Section 95.8 would articulate the Act's timing rules for successive applications. Sections 95.9, 95.10, and 95.11 would address the Act's requirements relating to compliance, data collection, and annual reports. Section 95.12 would incorporate a provision of the Act that allows the withholding of information whose disclosure would have serious adverse effects or be unlawful. More detailed descriptions of these provisions follow. <HD SOURCE="HD2">A. Section 95.1—Purpose</HD> The Act creates a system for reviewing and, as warranted, reinvestigating murder cases previously investigated by Federal agencies in which “all probative investigative leads have been exhausted” and “no likely perpetrator has been identified” after three years, HVFRA 12(6), upon application by certain persons. Section 95.1 would state this general purpose of the Act in terms similar to the Act's full title (“To provide for a system for reviewing the case files of cold case murders at the instance of certain persons, and for other purposes.”). <HD SOURCE="HD2">B. Section 95.2—Definitions</HD> <HD SOURCE="HD3">1. Paragraph (a)—Designated Person</HD> Section 95.2(a) would define “designated person” for purposes of the Act, which refers to the class of individuals who may apply for cold case murder reviews. Section 12(1) and (2) of the Act state that the term includes an “immediate family member,” defined to mean a parent, parent-in-law, grandparent, grandparent-in-law, sibling, spouse, child, or step-child of a murder victim, and “someone similarly situated” to an immediate family member, “as defined by the Attorney General.” While the express statutory definition of immediate family member includes a parent, child, or step-child, it does not include a step-parent. Pursuant to the Attorney General's authority under section 12(1) of the Act, § 95.2(a) would define “designated person” to include a step-parent, as a person “similarly situated” to a parent, in addition to immediate family members as defined in the statute. <HD SOURCE="HD3">2. Paragraph (b)—Victim</HD> Section 95.2(b) of the proposed rule, as provided in section 12(3) of the Act, would define “victim” to mean a natural person who died as a result of a cold case murder. <HD SOURCE="HD3">3. Paragraph (c)—Murder</HD> Section 95.2(c) of the proposed rule would implement section 12(4) of the Act, which defines “murder” to mean “any criminal offense under section 1111(a) of title 18, United States Code, or any offense the elements of which are substantially identical to such section.” Section 1111 of title 18 of the United States Code is the Federal murder offense that applies directly in cases arising in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, which includes Federal lands and facilities as provided in 18 U.S.C. 7(3). The first sentence of section 1111(a) defines “murder” as “the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought.” Malice aforethought is generally understood to mean killing a person intentionally, knowingly, or with extreme recklessness, albeit with variations in the verbal formulas that courts use to explicate the concept. <E T="03">See, e.g., United States</E> v. <E T="03">Begay,</E> 33 F.4th 1081, 1091 (9th Cir. 2022). The second sentence of section 1111 specifies tha ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Preview showing 10k of 117k characters. Full document text is stored and available for version comparison. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━