King sentenced to death penalty

JASPER, Texas - John William King, an avowed white supremacist, was sentenced to death yesterday for the racial murder of James Byrd Jr., a black man who was chained to a pickup truck in the predawn darkness and dragged on a winding stretch of pavement until his head and right arm were torn off.

King, one of three men charged in the killing, was convicted of capital murder Tuesday by a jury that deliberated for just over two hours. Yesterday, the same jurors, 11 white men and women and one black man - who was elected foreman - met for three hours before reaching their decision on a penalty.

The foreman, a prison guard who went to junior high school with King, passed the verdict sheet to Judge Joe Bob Golden, who looked at it, then at King.

"Mr. King," the judge said, "I hearby sentence you to death by lethal injection."

The crowded courtroom was hushed, unlike Tuesday, when a smattering of applause broke out among spectators after the guilty verdict was read. The defendant, a former prison inmate covered with racist tattoos, stared impassively, as he had through most of his week-long trial.

"Mr. Sheriff," the judge said, "you may take him to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to await execution there."

Moments later King was ushered from the courtroom through a side door, ending the first of three planned death-penalty trials in the murder last June 7, a crime that jolted this racially mixed city of 8,000 in the East Texas timberlands and reminded the world that backwoods lynchings are not entirely an evil of America's past.

Then, as he was being led in body armor a short distance across the courthouse lawn to a waiting sedan - a routine at the end of each court session - King for the first time offered a comment to the dozens of journalists gathered behind a rope line nearby.

It was a crude, barely audible sexual reference.

"It doesn't surprise me, coming from him," prosecutor Guy James Gray said later at a news conference, after the sedan had left for the state prison at Huntsville. The death chamber there is by far the country's busiest. "He has no remorse for what he did," Gray said.

Byrd, who was unemployed and afflicted with seizures, lived alone in a subsidized apartment in Jasper, 120 miles north of Houston. He was walking home from a family gathering after midnight when he was picked up, driven into the forest, beaten and stomped, then chained behind a truck and dragged for about three miles.

No trial dates have been set for King's alleged accomplices, Shawn Allen Berry and Lawrence Russell Brewer.

"I wouldn't expect him to say, 'God bless the Byrd family,'" said Mary Verrette, one of Byrd's sisters, referring to King's parting comment. "It kind of sums up the whole personality of this young man. He has no remorse, even in the face of death."

King's lawyers said he developed his racist views while serving a prison term for burglary from 1995 to 1997. They said he was a victim of a racial assault in the penitentiary and acquired his tattoos there for protection, hoping they would frighten would-be assailants.

Defense attorney Brack Jones Jr. told jurors before they began deliberating yesterday that King would not pose a serious threat to others if he were given a life term. The jury had the option of imposing that sentence, under which King would have been eligible for parole in 40 years.

Prosecutor Pat Hardy scoffed at Jones' argument, telling the jury: "By giving Mr. King a life sentence, you're giving him at least 40 years to kill a black guard, a black nurse, a black doctor, a Jewish guard, a Jewish nurse, a Jewish doctor, or anybody else ... who doesn't believe in his satanic, racist views."

Though he sat expressionless in court throughout his trial, King was not always so well behaved in the Jasper County jail cell where he was being held until yesterday, said Billy Rowles, the county sheriff. Wednesday night he was especially disruptive.

"He was raising Cain and kicking the doors and just acting the fool all night," Rowles said after the sentencing. "I think it was just that fact that reality has set in on him."

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