Dangerous Convictions for PDF - ADL

INTRODUCTION
M URDER IN T EXAS
Dangerous
Convictions:
AN INTRODUCTION TO EXTREMIST ACTIVITIES IN PRISONS
In the early Sunday morning hours of June 7, 1998, James Byrd, Jr., was walking
by the side of the road. The Jasper, Texas, resident had spent a busy day
Saturday, attending a wedding shower for a niece and several other parties;
now, he just wanted to get home. He did not own a car, so was used to walking
where he needed to go, but in a place like Jasper, whose 8,000 residents
usually knew each other pretty well, rides were often easy to get.
Sure enough, just a few blocks from the party Byrd left, a pickup truck slowed
down to pick him up. The truck belonged to another Jasper resident, Sean
Berry, who already had two passengers, his friends John King and Russell
Brewer. Byrd got in the back and Berry drove away. The group stopped first
at a nearby convenience store before heading out of town.
It was the last time anybody else saw James Byrd Jr. alive.
Byrd’s body was discovered later that Sunday—in several different places.
The trio who had given Byrd a lift drove him to an isolated forest clearing,
pulled him out of the truck, and brutally beat him. They spray-painted his
face black, chained him to the back of the truck, then sped down the road.
Byrd—who may or may not have been conscious at the time, according to
autopsy reports—took some time to die. The dragging first ripped his clothes
from his body, then tore Byrd’s head and shoulder from his torso. The trio of
killers dragged the rest of his body another mile down the road before
unhooking it.
The Jasper killing and its sheer brutality shocked the entire nation. The ugliness
of the racial killing—Byrd was black and his murderers were white—was
something many Americans had hoped had been left behind in the dark cor-
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