Word: byrds
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...barbaric dragging death of James Byrd Jr. were a movie--and at times it seemed like pure John Grisham--this was the scene that would have been certain to make it into the trailers. As a scowling John William King, 24, was led out of the Jasper County courthouse in shackles by Texas Rangers last week, reporters asked him if he had any message for the grieving Byrd family. It was a moment when, just briefly, repentance appeared possible. "Yeah," King sneered. He then invited the Byrds to perform a lewd sexual...
There's a reason King's story feels like a legal thriller: its plot line is melodramatic and painfully one-dimensional. The murder of Byrd is as horrific a crime as can be imagined--chaining a man to a truck and dragging him three miles until he dies of his injuries. And the protagonist is a dime-store white supremacist, spouting anti-black and anti-Semitic dogma and spewing hatred to the bitter end. Last week a Jasper jury tacked a Hollywood ending onto King's life story, convicting him of first-degree murder and sentencing him to death...
...courtroom. In towns like Jasper, not long ago, blacks--even black lawyers--were routinely called by their first name in court, often excluded as jurors, their testimony discounted again and again. Black life was so cheap that whites almost never got the death penalty for killing blacks. After Byrd's murder, King gloated to an accomplice that "we have made history." He may just be right. If his death penalty is carried out, he will be the first white Texan executed for killing a black since slavery ended...
...ever a crime cried out for grave punishment, it's this one. King and two friends were driving a 1982 Ford pickup in the early-morning hours last June. They spotted Byrd, 49, an unemployed vacuum-cleaner salesman, walking home from a party on a lonely stretch of Highway 96 and offered him a ride. They drove him to a deserted corner of the backwoods and, after a struggle, chained him to the truck by his ankles. Then they dragged him for three miles along a rural road outside Jasper. Byrd was alive for the first two miles, a pathologist...
...more horrifying turns in the courtroom, prosecutors argued that King and his accomplices had, after dragging Byrd half a mile, stopped to fix a flat tire. At that point Byrd was still alive and conscious. His tormentors then dragged him 2 1/2 more miles to his death. The jury also heard the tale of a young man sent to prison for burglary who emerged as a heavily tattooed member of a Klan spur group. One witness said King plotted to kill a black man when he returned to Jasper as part of a "blood-tie" initiation into the Klan chapter...