Word: pickup
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...went to school with them. (The black jury foreman was a classmate at Jasper High School.) King's life took a bad turn after his junior year of high school, when he was arrested for burglary--along with Shawn Berry, one of the two men with him in the pickup last June. The two were sent to boot camp together. Upon release, however, King violated probation and was given an eight-year prison term in July...
...racial slurs denouncing blacks, Jews, Hispanics and a variety of "race traitors." White women who date blacks are "whores," he said, and they should "hang from the same tree as their black boyfriends." At Beto, King shared a cell with Lawrence Brewer Jr., the third man in the pickup truck the night Byrd was killed...
...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...
There are any number of Americans who would make an exception for John William King, the feral white man who chained a black man, James Byrd Jr., to a pickup truck last year and dragged him along a rough country road that skinned him alive and dismembered him. To object to putting King to death for the deed requires a saintliness I do not possess. In one sense, King's case is almost a moral free ride. My conscience would remain untroubled by some other death sentences, but John William King's execution will seem especially just and fitting...