Word: murdered
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...Byrd's murder was a heinous crime against a man and his family, but it was also something larger. Lynching is the iconic Old South crime, used to punish slave insurrections. Lynch mobs traditionally hanged their victim from a rope tossed over a tree limb. But dragging deaths were not uncommon, first from horses, later from cars and trucks. Lynching was at once a brutal act of vigilante injustice and a larger statement--a warning to blacks to remain subservient...
...wounds and set whites against blacks. That calm reigned is in significant part because of the Byrd family, which preached harmony and refused to blame the entire white community for the acts of three men. King's father, for his part, apologized to the Byrds for the murder. "Please pray for the Byrd family, who have endured unimaginable pain and loss," he said. At one point, one of Byrd's daughters embraced a sorrowing Ronald King and whispered, "It's not your fault...
...this time the white person lost badly. The jury took only 2 1/2 hours to return the toughest verdict possible, capital murder. Jurors then listened to two days of penalty-phase testimony, which included a tearful plea for mercy from Ronald King. He arrived in court in a wheelchair, with an oxygen tube, needed because of his emphysema. Although some in the courtroom were visibly moved by this frail father's appeal, the jury unanimously voted for the death penalty. A critical factor, a juror said later, was that jail officials had recently found an 8-in. homemade knife...
...three decades since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. led to the collapse of the biracial coalition that produced the civil rights gains of the 1960s. It is, in some ways, more difficult to root out than the blatant hatred that led to James Byrd's murder because those who suffer from it are not even aware of their affliction. It makes it more difficult for people of all races to build on past victories in the struggle for equality because we have to keep fighting the same debilitating battles over and over. Every time an outrage like...