Around the Nation

Around the Nation

Dragging murderer sent to death row

After 14 hours of deliberations over two days, the jury rejected arguments that a life sentence would be adequate punishment for Brewer.

"I'm not a death penalty fan, but this is a situation where if you don't give the death penalty to this man, he'll hurt and kill again," Jasper County District Attorney Guy James Gray said.

Brewer's former prison buddy, John William King, is already on death row, convicted in February in the murder of James Byrd Jr.

Byrd was chained at the ankles to a pickup truck and dragged to pieces in the East Texas town of Jasper last year in one of the nation's grisliest crimes since the civil rights era.

A third man, Shawn Allen Berry, goes on trial next month. Prosecutors will seek the death penalty in that case, too.

Prosecutors said Brewer and King were organizing a white supremacist organization and wanted to do something dramatic to give their group publicity. Brewer later bragged about the crime in jailhouse letters.

Brewer showed little reaction to the verdict, pursing his lips slightly. His mother, Helen, who along with her husband had pleaded with the jury to spare his life, dabbed her face with a handkerchief.

The jurors, who convicted Brewer on Monday, told the judge they would not discuss the case with reporters.

Brewer testified that he only tried to kick Byrd as Byrd and King fought. He said Berry slit the man's throat with a knife and he didn't realize Berry had chained Byrd to the bumper until they began driving away.

DNA evidence showed Byrd's blood on the shoes of all three men.

In jailhouse letters introduced into evidence, Brewer referred to the murder and boasted about "rolling a tire," which prosecutors said was a derogatory term for assaulting a black person.

"Well, I did it," Brewer wrote. "And no longer am I a virgin. It was a rush and I'm still licking my lips for more."

Brewer also wrote King after their arrests, saying that they had become "bigger stars" than O.J. Simpson and that a life sentence would do them no justice. Brewer wrote that lethal injection would be "a little old sleeping medicine."

King was tried in Jasper, but Brewer's case was moved to Bryan, about 150 miles west, because of intense publicity.

Humans may have many more genes

Researchers at Incyte Pharmaceuticals, Inc., one of the private entities competing to map every human gene, believe about 140,000 genes make up the proteins that program cells in the human body.

Previous estimates put the number between 80,000 and 100,000.

''It simply means the human genome is probably more complex than previously predicted,'' Randy Scott, president of the Palo Alto-based company, said yesterday.

While some inherited disorders are caused by single genes, other diseases seem to result from groups of genes. Research into these diseases will be more difficult if there are more genes, since there could be more possible interactions between them.

''Finding the genes in simply inherited disorders like Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, has been relatively simple,'' said Victor McKusick, a genetics professor at Johns Hopkins University.

''The focus now is on common disorders - high blood pressure, asthma - in which it isn't just one gene but a whole cadre that cause the disorder,'' he said. ''That's already a very complex problem to tackle; if there are more genes it will complicate that issue appreciably.''

While the entire human genome includes about 3 billion base pairs of DNA molecules, the number of genes, or particular sequences of DNA, has always been an estimate. Biologists can't yet tell exactly where one sequence ends and another begins in the seemingly endless strands of molecules.

''I think the jury is still out on what the real number is,'' said Gerald Rubin, who leads a federally funded consortium at the University of California, Berkeley, that is working to map the fruit fly's much smaller genome. ''If true, it is surprisingly high.''

Incyte scientists came up with the new estimate by combining data from two decoding methods.

In one, they decoded the heads and tails of transcribed copies of DNA, known as RNA, and determined there were 130,000 genes in the genome. In the second method, based on a feature that occurs in about half of known genes, they calculated 143,000 genes in every human cell. The two figures produced the 140,000 estimate.

Rite Aid sued for faulty cash registers

The racketeering lawsuit filed Wednesday by Florida accuses Rite Aid of intentionally overcharging 29,000 uninsured customers more than $100,000 over a 27-month period, according to Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth's office.

Butterworth spokesman Joe Bizzaro didn't have estimates of how many stores were believed to be involved or how much customers allegedly were overcharged.

Rite Aid, the nation's third-largest drugstore chain, had about 30 drugstores in Florida during the period of the allegations.

But Butterworth's office said the Rite Aid policy was likely used in all its stores and has notified attorneys general in other states.

Rite Aid, in a brief statement, said the suit is without merit and that ''not one customer was deceived or defrauded.''

''We are confident we will prevail,'' the company said.

According to investigators, Rite Aid had two prices for the same prescriptions, adding a surcharge for uninsured customers. Rite Aid pharmacists in Florida had a key programmed into their cash registers to let them automatically overcharge customers, they said.

The average surcharge was allegedly $1.15, but many pharmacists disapproved of the policy and only added a penny extra to the prescription costs. Others quit over the policy, said investigators.

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