Death sentence for King in Byrd killing upheld

Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau

Oct. 19, 2000

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday upheld the death sentence of white supremacist John William King, one of three men convicted of capital murder in the dragging death of James Byrd Jr.

In its unanimous opinion, the nine-member court rejected all eight of King's challenges to his conviction.

King was convicted for his role in the 1998 abduction of Byrd, a black man, who was chained by his ankles to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to death near the East Texas town of Jasper.

King's lawyers had argued there was insufficient evidence to prove that Byrd had been abducted. Prosecutors had to prove the commission of a second felony to seek a death sentence.

"But the act of chaining Byrd to the truck and dragging him for a mile and a half was, by itself, kidnapping under the law," the court ruled. "Dragging a chained man from a truck also constitutes the use of deadly force to restrain that person and prevent his liberation."

The court also said that King's guilt was further supported by DNA evidence, "the extensive evidence of (King's) hatred for African-Americans," and King's letters to the media and a co-defendant. Those letters, the court said, could have been construed by the jury as an admission of his role in Byrd's murder.

Lawrence Russell Brewer Jr. of Sulphur Springs and Shawn Berry of Jasper also were convicted of capital murder in Byrd's death. Brewer also was sentenced to die while Berry was sentenced to life in prison.

Racist killer sentenced to death in Texas murder

Biography of John William King highlights brutalization of American society

By Jerry White

26 February 1999

The gruesome details surrounding the racist murder of James Byrd Jr. have evoked widespread anger and an understandable popular revulsion towards John William King, the young white man convicted earlier this week for the dragging death of the 49-year-old black man last June in Jasper, Texas.

On Tuesday the jury, made up of 11 whites and one black, convicted King, 24, after deliberating little more than two hours. Two days later the same jury sentenced him to death.

The fact that a largely white Southern jury would swiftly convict a racist killer is a measure of the change in social attitudes in America. Thirty years ago those who lynched a black man in the South had little fear of being convicted, or even facing trial. This change in thinking among layers of the population is due largely to the great social struggles against segregation and for civil rights, from the 1950s on, which have taken deep root among working people.

This was reflected in the attitude of the jury, which elected its lone black member as foreman, and of King's father, a retired sawmill worker, who apologized to the Byrd family again after the conviction. Byrd's relatives welcomed his gesture and acknowledged that King had not raised his son as a racist.

The question gripping both families, and the black and white residents of Jasper, many of whom have demonstratively expressed their opposition to racism, was how did this happen? The efforts of the prosecutors, law enforcement officers and news commentators to portray King as simply a bad individual, the embodiment of evil, does not provide a serious answer to this question. Furthermore, to suggest that this matter will be resolved by executing King means to sweep under the rug the more profound and, indeed, disturbing questions raised by this crime.

There is no doubt that King and his accomplices need to be jailed, perhaps for the rest of their lives. More fundamental, however, is the need to examine the social, ideological and political conditions that gave rise to King's white supremacist views and this crime.

The convicted killer's father, who suffers from emphysema and lost two fingers in a sawmill, told the Dallas Morning News, "The way he was raised, I don't see how he could have that kind of hate in him." The elder King said with his encouragement his son had grown up with black friends, and that he, Ronald King, has good friends and two goddaughters who are black. As the father heard witnesses testify last week about his son's participation in racist prison gangs and his role in the dragging death of Byrd, Ronald King said, "That ain't the boy I knew."

It is worthwhile to examine John William King's transformation, if only in brief. Born in Mississippi, the poorest state in the US, he was adopted when he was three months old. Shortly afterwards Ronald King and his wife moved their son and two daughters to east Texas, an impoverished rural area. They settled in Jasper, a racially mixed town of 8,000 dependent on timber, light manufacturing and bass fishing.

When King was 15 his mother died and the father raised three children on his income from a plywood mill. At the age of 17 King was arrested for burglary and dropped out of Jasper High School. Soon afterwards he was in trouble again when he and another 17-year-old drop-out (Shawn Berry, who has also been charged in the murder of James Byrd Jr.) were caught stealing beer and pool cues from a local vending machine company.

The two young men were first sent to a correctional boot camp, one of the more recent innovations of the US juvenile justice system where youth are subjected to military-style discipline. After King was released he drifted, mostly without a job, and a few months later was back in court over a conflict with his probation officer. This time the judge revoked King's probation and sentenced him to an eight-year prison sentence. In 1995 the 20-year-old King found himself in the Beto I Unit, a 3,200-inmate penitentiary in Tennessee County, Texas.

In America the very idea that youthful offenders can or should be rehabilitated has come to be derided. Instead judges impose ever-harsher sentences, and once inside the "correctional system" these young people are subjected to dehumanizing punishment by sadistic authorities. The US incarcerates the highest percentage of its population of any country in the industrialized world.

America's overflowing prisons are a breeding ground for the white supremacist elements with whom King began to associate. As one former inmate from a Huntsville, Texas prison said, "The problem is the huge influx of young convicts with unimaginably long sentences, who are angry and afraid and all too willing to band together in groups with racial or geographical bonds. They cloak their despair in rage, and they act out that rage on anyone not of their group."

Prison guards and officials encourage a brutal struggle for survival between white, black and Hispanic prisoners and do little to stop even the most murderous confrontations. At the same time, as the correctional system has focused on warehousing prisoners instead of rehabilitation, funding has been slashed for higher learning and other programs in prisons. But as another inmate commented, "The human mind needs to be occupied to overcome ignorance."

In prison King met Lawrence Brewer, the third suspect in the murder of Byrd. They both became associated with a small circle of inmates using the name of the North Carolina-based Ku Klux Klan faction, the Confederate Knights of America. They were involved in a racial conflict between white and Hispanic prisoners in 1995. Soon King was sending out letters proclaiming racist views and his allegiance to the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist gang founded in California's San Quentin prison in the 1960s, which is affiliated to the paramilitary Aryan Nations.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, many white supremacist and anti-Semitic groups provide prisoners free or heavily discounted copies of their publications, and other readers of these racist magazines are encouraged to write to these "prisoners of war." Many of these publications espouse the racist theology of the Christian Identity movement, a church which maintains that Anglo-Saxons, not Jews, are the biblical "chosen people," that non-whites are "mud people" on the level of animals and that Jews are the "children of Satan."

A fellow inmate testified that King, who adorned his body with racist tattoos in prison, had vowed to kidnap and kill a black man when he got free as part of a gang initiation rite, known behind bars as a "blood tie." Prosecutors say King wanted to attract attention and recruits to a racist group he planned to start in Jasper.

It takes a great deal to condition a human being to be able to chain a man to the back of a truck, drag him behind the vehicle for miles, then leave his dismembered and decapitated body outside a black cemetery. The systematic dehumanization King experienced in prison, along with the racial poison to which he was introduced, were essential psychological components in the motivation of this heinous crime. But they were not the only factors.

Prison life is, perhaps, only the most concentrated form of the brutal society that exists in America. Human compassion and empathy are denounced as weakness and every aspect of life is dominated by a struggle of the individual against all others.

In the workplace, thousands of are thrown out of their jobs for the good of wealthy stockholders. Political authorities utilize the most violent methods to deal with intractable social problems. In Texas, a death row population overwhelmingly comprised of the poor, minorities and the mentally impaired is systematically executed. In New York City policemen fire 41 bullets into the body of a frightened, unarmed African immigrant. And, finally, the nightly news brings the latest reports of US "air strikes" in a distant country.

Perhaps the most explosive ingredients in this mixture are the worsening social and economic conditions affecting large sections of the population. Despite the repeated claims by the Clinton White House and the news media of America's booming economy, tens of millions in towns like Jasper are enduring a desperate situation.

King, Brewer and Berry--like many young workers, black and white--drifted from one low-paying job to another with no future. They became the raw material for racist organizations which blame these economic problems on blacks and Hispanics.

Such political tendencies are deliberately cultivated by sections of the American ruling class. Indeed, having abandoned any efforts at reform, both big business parties have increasingly turned to law-and-order demagogy and attacks on welfare recipients and immigrants, which encourage the revival and spread of race prejudice.

This holds true particularly for the Republican Party, which has actively courted right-wing militia groups and has close ties with racist organizations such as the Council of Conservative Citizens. In the state of Mississippi, John William King's birthplace, one third of the state legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, are affiliated with this racist organization, as well as the state's most powerful politician, Trent Lott, the Majority Leader of the US Senate.

Trent Lott may not speak to the John William Kings of this world. The Southern aristocracy generally keeps its distance from those it regards as "white trash." But he speaks to the CCC (the "respectable" version of the KKK), and the CCC stokes up the Kings and turns their social anger in the most reactionary direction. These are the real connections, never discussed in the mass media, between the horrible events in Jasper and the social antagonisms in America.

The trial of John King for the brutal killing of James Byrd Jr. opened on Tuesday in Jasper, Texas. King, 24, is the first of three expected to stand trial for the murder of Byrd, 49, killed in the early morning hours of June 7, 1998. King, along with Shawn Berry, 23, and Lawrence Brewer, 31, are alleged to have severely beaten Byrd, before chaining him to a pickup truck and dragging him to his dismemberment and death.

King, Berry and Brewer, all white, established ties to racist organizations during previous prison terms. Byrd was black.

The prosecutor, District Attorney Guy James Gray, made his opening statement Tuesday, arguing that physical evidence and King's racist writings would demonstrate his responsibility for the murder. King pled not guilty to the charges while his attorney, Haden "Sonny" Cribbs, declined to make an opening statement.

In the weeks leading up to the trial, King has written to Texas newspapers claiming that Berry acted alone in killing Byrd and that neither he nor Brewer were present. In his confession to the police last June, Berry maintained that all three were present, but that Brewer and King attacked Byrd and chained him to Berry's pickup truck.

On Tuesday prosecutors entered into evidence a lighter found at the woodlands clearing where Byrd was chained to the truck. It was engraved with "KKK" and King's prison nickname. Prosecutors also submitted 22 pages of documents, handwritten by King, intended to serve as bylaws for a racist group he had hoped to start, the "Confederate Knights of America Texas Rebel Soldiers." (The Confederate Knights of America is a North Carolina affiliate of the Ku Klux Klan.)

Byrd's family left the courtroom in tears as photographs of his remains and fragments of his tattered clothes were shown to jurors. Equally horrifying was the fact that Byrd was initially conscious while being dragged and tried to prop his head up from the pavement by leaning on his elbows. His head was severed after one mile while his torso was dragged for an additional two miles before being dumped in front of a black cemetery.

The prosecution stated that it would submit DNA evidence further linking King to the crime scene. Saliva tests done on cigarettes found in the clearing reportedly point to all three charged in the murder. Byrd's blood was also allegedly found on King's shoes.

The jury includes eleven whites and one black. Although the town of Jasper is half black, the surrounding county from which the jury pool was drawn is only 18 percent black.

King's adoptive father Ronald, who wrote an apology to Byrd's family after the murder, expressed his dismay and grief over the crime in a November interview with the Dallas Morning News. He told the paper that his son was not raised to be a racist, and that he had grown up around children who were black, including two of Ronald's goddaughters.

John King, the defendant, dropped out of high school in 1992 and was arrested twice for burglary. The second incident led to an eight-year prison sentence that began in July 1995. In prison he shared a cell with Brewer, eight years older and jailed for burglary, cocaine possession and parole violations. Brewer and Berry would later move in with King in the spring of 1998, following King's parole in July 1997 and Brewer's in September of the same year.

In prison King took up with inmates involved in the "Confederate Knights." There he acquired a number of his tattoos, which reportedly include Nazi symbols and a picture of a black man being hung. According to a report published in the Morning News, while in jail he also discussed a plan to drag someone to death.

The sadistic murder of a middle-aged black man in Texas last week is an indication of the savagery which lies just beneath the surface of American life. James Byrd, Jr., 49, was beaten unconscious, chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged for miles over rural roads outside the town of Jasper.

Three white men, John William King, 23, Shawn Berry 23, and Lawrence Brewer Jr., 31, have been arrested. Berry has already given a confession that implicates the other two as the principal assailants. Both King and Brewer had links to white supremacist groups while serving terms in state prison. In the course of the killing King reportedly made a reference to the "Turner Diaries," a fascistic novel which was in the possession of Timothy McVeigh when he was arrested for his role in the Oklahoma City bombing.

The official commentaries on this atrocity--from the media, the Democratic and Republican politicians and the civil rights establishment--have not gone beyond the horror of the killing and its racist motives to begin a more searching examination of its social roots.

The black mayor of Jasper said race relations in the town were good: "Here you have a hospital administrator who is black, the executive director of the East Texas Council of Government is black, the president of the chamber of commerce is black, the past president of the school board is black and the mayor and two councilmen are black.''

Precisely! The mayor's statement quite unintentionally highlights how limited in many respects and how fragile is the social progress made since the days of Jim Crow. A handful of middle class blacks may hold privileged positions, and legal segregation may be banned, but it is still the case that a black man is in danger of being beaten and murdered because of the color of his skin.

Today the killers are arrested and jailed, rather than being patted on the back by the local authorities, but that will not bring back James Byrd Jr., or prevent the next such attack.

Given a description as to the whereabouts of the dirt trail, where an alleged beating of the deceased occurred, it's essential to acknowledge the fact that Shawn Berry co-inherited a small tract of land adjacent to the tram road; which he visited quite frequently.

However, unacknowledged facts remain; that I, along with Russell Brewer and Louis Berry, had been borrowing Shawn Berry's truck to commute to and from an out of town land clearing job each day.  My girlfriends [sic] watch was kept in Shawn Berry's truck for us to keep track of the time. Louis Berry had brought along several of his CD's for our listening pleasure during our hourly drive each morning and evening, which he had a tendency to leave in his brother's truck.

Furthermore, the aforementioned cigarette lighter had been misplaced a week or so prior to these fraudulent charges that have been brought against Russell Brewer and me. This so forth, does not prove the presence of my girlfriend, Louis Berry, Russell Brewer, nor myself at the scene of the crime; verifiably, only the owners of the property in question...

Scientists, authorities, investigative reporters and a credulous public need a word of caution about incidents of poor observations. In such incidents as Mr. Brewer's and my involvement in this case, authorities and the media are making accusations based on visual judgement [sic] and criminal histories of slight deviations from what is considered normal.

Procedures are often  flawed because the  results could be easily influenced by the observer's desire to gain recognition or to contribute to a national honor. That should not be interpreted that no facts can be trusted.  Mistakes are easy to make. The main point is to prudently cautious about accepting facts as true. We must be ready to listen to people who think our facts are wrong, and make an effort to check the facts we so often take for granted...

Decide just what you believe. In a review of verified facts, a diverse motive for murder will be objectively established; thus insinuating Russell Brewer's and my innocence. A more meaningful way of looking at the situation would be to make references to Shawn Berry's irate temper, abusive behavior, and steroid use.