Word: jasper
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...week full of alarming stories about racial prejudice, the most unsettling was not about the sickening details of how James Byrd Jr. was chained to a pickup truck and dragged to death--a crime that last week led a jury in Jasper, Texas, to impose the death penalty on one of his killers. Nor was the worst situation the continuing fury over the fatal police shooting in New York City of unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo or the equally infuriating police shooting of 19-year-old Tyisha Miller last December in Riverside, Calif...
...GWYNNE, our Austin bureau chief, writes this week on the healing process that the town of Jasper, Texas, has undergone in the wake of a vicious race crime. "Some stories are sheer tragedy, not redeemed by anything," says Gwynne, who has seen his share of sad stories during his 10 years with TIME. "But here, in spite of the horrible deed, the community has repaired itself morally and spiritually. There has been real soul searching...
After the sentencing, a black bystander outside the courthouse in Jasper, Texas, told a reporter, "I am not in favor of the death penalty. But in this case, I will make an exception...
What happened in Jasper stands slightly to one side of the usual argument about capital punishment. It mobilizes different issues of justice. Here, racial payback overrides the familiar philosophical dilemma presented by executions...
...public health, like disposing of an incurable case of rabies. If sentenced to life, King would probably kill someone else in jail, the prosecution reasoned--another black, or a Jew perhaps, so lively and irrepressible boils his hate. He displays no shadow of remorse, and even in the Jasper jail, awaiting trial, he managed to get hold of an 8-in. knife. The jury did not find it hard to conclude that, among other reasons to execute him, he is simply too dangerous to go on living...