"Justice Being Served": White Supremacist Executed In 1998 Dragging Death

Two decades after his conviction, John William King was executed Wednesday night in Texas for the murder of the James Byrd Jr., a crime that caught national attention and prompted a national discussion about hate crime legislation.

The Associated Press confirmed the execution shortly after 8 p.m. King was given a lethal injection.

The June 1998 attack instantly harked back to an era of lynchings and racially motivated slayings across the South. Prosecutors said Byrd, a 49-year-old black man, was killed after being dragged from the back of a car for nearly 3 miles. The trials of the three white men charged with the crime drew wide attention to Jasper, a town of about 7,500 in East Texas, a short drive from the state's boundary with Louisiana.

One of the other men was convicted of capital murder and was executed in 2011; the third was sentenced to life in prison.

The execution of 44-year old King is "justice being served," said Louvon Byrd Harris, one of Byrd's sisters.

"They were determined to treat him like an animal," she told The Washington Post before the execution. "They were a danger to society. That's when we start changing our opinion about the death penalty."

King is the fourth inmate executed this year in the United States.

Byrd's body was found in pieces along a Texas country road. Forensic investigators said injuries that killed Byrd - cuts and scrapes around his ankles and other abrasions on his body - indicated that his ankles had been wrapped together with a chain and that he had been dragged by a car.

A day after Byrd's body was found, police pulled over a truck driven by a man named Shawn Berry for a traffic violation. In the vehicle, they found a tool set that matched the wrench found at the crime scene. Dried blood under the truck and on one of the tires matched Byrd's DNA.

The cigarette butts were also tested for DNA, and one came up with a hit for King, who had served a prison sentence for burglary.

King's nickname in prison was "Possum," investigators learned. He was charged, along with Berry and Lawrence Russell Brewer, with capital murder.

King's trial opened in January. Prosecutors from the Jasper County District Attorney's Office showed evidence of King's "violent hatred" of black people, according to court documents.

"During his first stint in prison (which ended about a year before Byrd was killed), King was the 'exalted cyclops' of the Confederate Knights of America (CKA), a white-supremacist gang," an appeals court wrote in 2018.

They also drew attention to his tattoos, which included a Confederate flag, Nazi "SS" symbols, a cartoon in a Ku Klux Klan robe, "KKK," a swastika, "Aryan Pride" and a depiction of a black man hanging from a tree by a noose.

King had spoken of starting a race war while in prison, "and about initiating new members to his cause by having them kidnap and murder black people," the appeals court wrote.

Prosecutors played a videotape showing the nearly 3 miles of road along which Byrd had been dragged behind the truck.

Prosecutors called 43 witnesses; King's attorney called three. King did not testify.

After five days of testimony, a jury returned a verdict of guilty of capital murder within 2 1/2 hours.

King, who has maintained his innocence, appealed his verdict numerous times with complaints about the lawyer he had during his trial. On Monday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals voted 5-4 to reject King's request to stay his scheduled execution.

His lawyer, Richard Ellis, submitted a last-minute petition Tuesday to the nation's highest court that said that his client had "maintained his absolute innocence," and argued that his initial lawyer had conceded his guilt against King's wishes during the trial 20 years ago.

But the state submitted a brief in opposition, arguing that the court lacks jurisdiction to review the claims and the Supreme Court denied the stay of execution on Wednesday night.

Byrd has influenced several laws to strengthen penalties for hate crimes that were passed in Texas and signed by Gov. Rick Perry in 2001 (George W. Bush, when he was governor, had declined to support the measure, saying all crimes are hate crimes, according to the AP) and at the federal level, in a bill signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2009.