JASPER, TEXAS
Racist convicted in sadistic murder
By
Deirdre Griswold
The first of three avowed racists charged with the horrific
dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas, last June
has been convicted of capital murder. Spectators in the
courtroom applauded as the verdict was announced Feb. 23.
John William King was linked to Byrd's death by DNA
evidence--the victim's blood was found on his sandals--and
items left at the scene of the crime. The prosecution also
entered as evidence photos of racist and neo-Nazi tattoos on
King's body. One showed a Black person being hung from a tree.
Another patch identified the white supremacist group
"Confederate Knights of America" over the words "Aryan
Pride."
King's two roommates, Shawn Berry and Russell Brewer, are
still awaiting trial for the killing.
The murder horrified people around the world by its
incredible brutality. Byrd's body was found in pieces along a
Texas road after he had been chained to a pickup truck by the
ankles and dragged for three miles. The route of the truck,
which belonged to Berry, went straight through a Black
community in Jasper.
The jury of 11 whites and one Black man deliberated only two
and a half hours before arriving at a guilty verdict. The
jurors sustained the prosecution's contention that Byrd was
both kidnapped and murdered. Two such crimes are necessary in a
death penalty case.
In building a case against King, the prosecution charged he
committed the murder in order to gain the notoriety necessary
to found his own white supremacist gang, the "Texas Rebel
Soldiers." And it looked at first as though King was flaunting
his role.
King admitted in a November letter to the Dallas Morning
News that he had been in the truck, although no witnesses had
yet come forward to place him there. In another letter to
co-defendant Russell Brewer, he revealed that blood-stained
clothing "missed" by the police was still in his apartment.
But if he had had some thought of using the trial as a
platform for his vicious racist views, he abandoned it when the
trial began. King never took the stand. He tried, in a series
of letters to the press, to absolve himself and pin the blame
on Berry.
There is virulent racism in Texas, and the jails are full of
oppressed Black and Latino people to prove it. But the racist
establishment clearly wants to wash its hands of John William
King and his drinking buddies. It doesn't need amateurs acting
out their sick and murderous fantasies as though there had
never been a Civil War or a civil-rights movement or
anti-colonial liberation struggles around the world.
Unlike the killing of Medgar Evers, the murders of the
Mississippi civil-rights workers, and the Birmingham church
bombing, this crime appears to have come from disaffected
racist elements--the media keep calling King an "unemployed
laborer" and stress his prison record--instead of from within
the racist state apparatus.
The power structure has shown that it doesn't need a John
King at this time. It has the Texas prison system, which has
been called a racist killing machine. Most of the prisoners
currently on death row there are Black and Latino, and a
vigorous movement has grown up in these communities against the
death penalty.
If anyone deserves capital punishment, it is certainly the
killers of James Byrd. But the capitalist state has brought
back the death penalty in order to fortify repression and
racist injustice, not to end racism. These factors will
undoubtedly be considered carefully by the anti-racist movement
in formulating a position on the death penalty in this
case.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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