JASPER, Tex., Feb. 23 – John William King, a self-proclaimed white supremacist covered with racist tattoos, was convicted of murder today in the death of a black man who was dragged on a chain behind a pickup truck last June.
The jury, which deliberated for just over two hours, chose its only black member as foreman, allowing him to deliver the verdict in an apparent gesture repudiating the gruesome racial murder that shocked and shamed this quiet little city in the East Texas woodlands.
Clara Taylor, left, and Mary Verrett, sisters of James Byrd
Jr., listen as the guilty verdict is read in their brother's death at
the Jasper County Courthouse in Jasper, Tex., on Tuesday.
(AFP Photo) King, 24, a former prison inmate, sat expressionless as the foreman passed the verdict sheet to Judge Joe Bob Golden. Besides convicting King of murdering James Byrd Jr., 49, in one of the grisliest racial crimes of the post-civil rights era, jurors found that the dragging also constituted a kidnapping, meaning that under Texas law King can be sentenced to death.
To a smattering of applause from spectators, the jury filed from the crowded courtroom moments after the verdict, which climaxed a week-long trial. They then returned a half-hour later for the start of the trial's penalty phase, which lawyers said likely will conclude Thursday. If the jury decides against the death penalty, King will be sentenced to life in prison with parole eligibility after 40 years.
"I'm very satisfied with the length of the deliberations and I'm very satisfied with their choice of a foreman," District Attorney Guy James Gray said outside the courthouse after the verdict. "I think any jury in the country would feel the same way" about Byrd's murder last June 7 on a remote stretch of backwoods pavement. "You can't tolerate this stuff. You can't put up with it."
Gray and his assistants also will prosecute King's two alleged accomplices – Shawn Allen Berry, 24, and Lawrence Russell Brewer, 31 – in separate death-penalty trials later. In King's trial, they argued that he instigated the murder to draw attention to a white supremacist group he had hoped to organize in Jasper, a racially mixed city of about 8,000 in the pine woods 125 miles north of Houston.
In his closing argument, another prosecutor, Pat Hardy, described King and his co-defendants as "three robed riders coming straight out of hell." Noting that Byrd's dismembered body was left by the gate of an old black cemetery, Hardy said the three wanted "to show their defiance to God and Christianity and everything most people in this county stand for."
Byrd, who was unemployed and living alone in a subsidized apartment, was walking home from a family gathering after midnight when he was picked up and driven to woods outside the city. There, he was beaten, then chained at the ankles and dragged behind a pickup truck for about three miles. In testimony Monday, a pathologist said Byrd was alive until his head and right arm were torn off by the jagged edge of a roadside culvert.
That testimony was crucial for the prosecution. The underlying felony of kidnapping is what made Byrd's murder a death-penalty offense. For Byrd to have been kidnapped under Texas's definition of the crime, he had to have been alive while being dragged.
"It's like a breath of fresh air for me," Byrd's daughter, Renee Mullins, said after the verdict. Like other relatives of the victim who filled two rows at the front of the spectator gallery during the trial, "Three robed riders coming straight out of hell."
READ MORE: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/jasper/guilty022499.htm
The Other Execution Tonight—the Man Who Dragged James Byrd Jr. to His Death
If you are inclined to question capital punishment, it is not hard to protest the scheduled execution tonight of Troy Davis in Georgia. His case contains much doubt about his guilt, and the racial aspect (black man as victim of white-dominated justice system) is undeniable. What really tests a principled position against the death penalty are cases like Lawrence Brewer.
That’s why I was happy to receive, just a few minutes ago, an e-mail from the National Coalition Against the Death Penalty. Of course, it calls for last-minute action to save Davis. But it also includes this key section:
MORE: http://www.thenation.com/blog/163536/other-execution-tonight%E2%80%94-man-who-dragged-james-byrd-jr-his-death#
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