John William King, 44, convicted two decades ago for killing
James Byrd Jr. in an act of unfathomable racist brutality in the small town of
Jasper, was executed on April 24, 2019 by the State of Texas on with a dose
of pentobarbital, reported the New York Times.
The execution, carried out at the state’s death chamber in
Huntsville, came after the United States Supreme Court turned down Mr. King’s
last petition for a stay. He was pronounced dead at 7:08 p.m., said Jeremy
Desel, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Mr. King kept his eyes closed as witnesses arrived to the
execution chamber on Wednesday, The Associated Press reported. When the prison
warden, Bill Lewis, asked him if he had any final words, Mr. King said, “No.”
Mr. King made a final statement issued in writing, Mr. Desel
said. “Capital Punishment: Them without the capital get the punishment,” it
said.
Early on a Sunday morning in 1998, Mr. King and two other
white men attacked Mr. Byrd, a 49-year-old black man who had been offered a
ride home in a sinister gesture of neighborliness. The men beat him,
spray-painted his face, chained him to the back of a pickup truck and dragged
him to his death on an isolated back road. The motive seemed shockingly
clear-cut: Mr. King, who had come out of a stint in prison, was a committed
white supremacist, his body a billboard of racist tattoos, including one
depicting a black man hanged in a noose.
Louvon Harris, a sister of Mr. Byrd’s who planned to attend
the execution, said on Tuesday that Mr. King’s death by lethal injection would
not compare to the way he had tortured her brother. “He’s not going through any
pain,” she said. “He’s not chained and bound and dragged on a concrete road,
swinging back and forth like a sack of potatoes, with an arm coming off and
being decapitated or nothing like that.”
“When you look at it at that angle,” she continued, “I don’t
have sympathy.”
Less than a year after the killing, Mr. King became the
first white man in modern Texas history to be sentenced to death for killing a
black person. This was a troubling milestone given that, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, 344
black people were lynched in the 73 years after Reconstruction, a tally that
included only documented lynchings and that stopped in 1950.
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