Thursday, September 22, 2011 3:17:45 AM
Victim's son objects as Texas sets execution in hate crime death
Lawrence Russell Brewer, of Sulpher Springs, Texas,shown in a picture released by the authorities June 9, 1998.
Credit: Reuters/STR New
By Karen Brooks
AUSTIN, Texas | Wed Sep 21, 2011 10:45am EDT
AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - As Texas prepares to execute one of his father's killers, Ross Byrd hopes the state shows the man the mercy his father, James Byrd Jr., never got when he was dragged behind a truck to his death.
"You can't fight murder with murder," Ross Byrd, 32, told Reuters late Tuesday, the night before Wednesday's scheduled execution of Lawrence Russell Brewer for one of the most notorious hate crimes in modern times.
"Life in prison would have been fine. I know he can't hurt my daddy anymore. I wish the state would take in mind that this isn't what we want."
Brewer is scheduled to die by lethal injection after 6 p.m. local time in Huntsville, Texas.
His pending execution comes 10 years after Governor Rick Perry signed into law the James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act, strengthening punishments for hate crimes.
An avowed white supremacist, Brewer, 44, was one of three white men convicted of capital murder in the kidnapping and killing of Byrd Jr., in June 1998.
John King, another white supremacist, is on death row awaiting an execution date. Shawn Berry is serving a life sentence.
Brewer would be the 11th man executed in Texas this year. In Georgia, the execution of Troy Davis, convicted of killing a police officer, is scheduled for the same night.
If both executions go forward, Brewer and Davis would be the 34th and 35th executions in the United States in 2011.
In Texas, a vigil in Huntsville began at midnight with civil rights activist Dick Gregory.
PROTESTS
Gregory has joined Ross Byrd and Martin Luther King III in the past to publicly protest Brewer's execution.
Ross Byrd, a recording artist studying for his MBA at nearby Stephen F. Austin University, said Tuesday that he wouldn't attend the execution but will "be there in spirit."
He says he doesn't want to "waste my time" watching anybody die, even a man who killed his dad.
"Life goes on," said Byrd, who has a son. "I've got responsibilities that I have every day. It's not on the front page of my mind. I'm looking for happy times."
In a crime that touched off a nationwide effort to tighten punishments for hate crimes, Brewer, King and Berry were convicted of offering Byrd Jr. a ride on his way home from a party, and then attacking him while they were standing outside the truck smoking on a country road near Jasper, Texas, according to a report by the Texas Attorney General's Office.
They beat him, and then chained his legs to the back of their pick-up and dragged him for several miles, the report said. By the time they stopped, his head and arm had been ripped off. They left his body on the country road.
Brewer maintained his innocence, saying Berry had killed Byrd Jr. by cutting his throat. But prosecutors said Brewer and King were prison buddies bent on starting a racist organization in Jasper and "intended the killing to be a signal that his (King's) racist organization was up and running."
The crime touched off a firestorm of support in Texas and the United States for laws that would enhance punishments for crimes motivated by race, religion, color, disability, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry.
The jury sentenced the three men as the nation was still reeling from a second hate crime that same year -- the October 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, beaten and left to die on a fence in Wyoming because he was gay.
'WATERSHED MOMENT'
In 2001, Texas passed its hate crimes bill named after Byrd Jr., and its symbolic signing by Perry was a "watershed moment" in Texas and one of Perry's "finest moments in office," said Texas state Senator Rodney Ellis, a Houston Democrat, who helped move the bill through the Texas Senate in spite of staunch Republican opposition.
Eight years later, President Obama signed into law a similar federal bill named after Byrd Jr. and Shepard.
"James Byrd's murder certainly changed Texas and, in many ways, the nation," Ellis told Reuters.
"It was a wake-up call that evil and hate, while no longer considered mainstream views, are more prevalent and virulent than we pretend."
Ellis said the death sentence in Brewer's case "will close a chapter in this tragic story."
"I cannot say for certain that it is a requirement in order for justice to be served but, as Mr. Brewer was a ringleader in the most brutal hate crime in the post-Civil Rights era, it is certainly a very appropriate sentence," he said.
Unlike Byrd's children and wife, all of whom oppose the use of the death penalty against his killers, other family members have been supportive of it.
"I'm not down on them at all for the fact that they support the death penalty," said David Atwood, a good friend of Ross Byrd's and founder of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. "They've gone through a traumatic experience, and there's a history in our country of horrible things happening to African Americans, so it's understandable that a number of them would say finally we're getting some justice."
He called Ross Byrd's stand "powerful."
Byrd says the execution of Brewer is simply another expression of the hate shown toward his father on that dark night in 1998. Everybody, he said, including the government, should choose not to continue that cycle.
"Everybody's in that position," he said. "And I hope they will stand back and look at it before they go down that road of hate. Like Ghandi said, an eye for an eye, and the whole world will go blind."
(Editing by Jerry Norton)
Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/21/us-texas-execution-son-idUSTRE78K35B20110921 [with comments]
*
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===
White Supremacist Executed for Texas Dragging
This undated handout photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows Lawrence Russell Brewer.
(Texas Department of Criminal Justice/AP Photo)
FILE - James Byrd Jr., shown in this 1997 family photo, was tied to a truck and dragged to his death along a rural East Texas road early Sunday, June 7, 1998, near Jasper, Texas. Lawrence Russell Brewer, 44, one of two purported white supremacists condemned for Byrd’s death, is set for execution Wednesday for participating in chaining Byrd to the back of a pickup truck, dragging the black man along the road and dumping what was left of his shredded body outside a black church and cemetery.
(AP Photo/Byrd Family Photo, File)
By MICHAEL GRACZYK Associated Press
HUNTSVILLE, Texas September 21, 2011 (AP)
White supremacist gang member Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed Wednesday evening for the infamous dragging death slaying of James Byrd Jr., a black man from East Texas.
Byrd, 49, was chained to the back of a pickup truck and pulled whip-like to his death along a bumpy asphalt road in one of the most grisly hate crime murders in recent Texas history.
Brewer, 44, was asked if he had any final words, to which he replied: "No. I have no final statement."
He glanced at his parents watching through a nearby window, took several deep breaths and closed his eyes. A single tear hung on the edge of his right eye as he was pronounced dead at 6:21 p.m., 10 minutes after the lethal drugs began flowing into his arms, both covered with intricate black tattoos.
Byrd's sisters also were among the witnesses in an adjacent room.
"Hopefully, today's execution of Brewer can remind all of us that racial hatred and prejudice leads to terrible consequence for the victim, the victim's family, for the perpetrator and for the perpetrator's family," Clara Taylor, one of Byrd's sisters, said.
She called the punishment "a step in the right direction."
"We're making progress," Taylor said. "I know he was guilty so I have no qualms about the death penalty."
Appeals to the courts for Brewer were exhausted and no last-day attempts to save his life were filed.
Besides Brewer, John William King, now 36, also was convicted of capital murder and sent to death row for Byrd's death, which shocked the nation for its brutality. King's conviction and death sentence remain under appeal. A third man, Shawn Berry, 36, received a life prison term.
"One down and one to go," Billy Rowles, the retired Jasper County sheriff who first investigated the horrific scene, said. "That's kind of cruel but that's reality."
It was about 2:30 a.m. on a Sunday, June 7, 1998, when witnesses saw Byrd walking on a road not far from his home in Jasper, a town of more than 7,000 about 125 miles northeast of Houston. Many folks knew he lived off disability checks, couldn't afford his own car and walked where he needed to go. Another witness then saw him riding in the bed of a dark pickup.
Six hours later and some 10 miles away on Huff Creek Road, the bloody mess found after daybreak was thought at first to be animal road kill. Rowles, a former Texas state trooper who had taken office as sheriff the previous year, believed it was a hit-and-run fatality but evidence didn't match up with someone caught beneath a vehicle. Body parts were scattered and the blood trail began with footprints at what appeared to be the scene of a scuffle.
"I didn't go down that road too far before I knew this was going to be a bad deal," he said at Brewer's trial.
Fingerprints taken from the headless torso identified the victim as Byrd.
Testimony showed the three men and Byrd drove out into the county about 10 miles and stopped along an isolated logging road. A fight broke out and the outnumbered Byrd was tied to the truck bumper with a 24½-foot logging chain. Three miles later, what was left of his shredded remains was dumped between a black church and cemetery where the pavement ended on the remote road.
Brewer, King and Berry were in custody by the end of the next day.
The crime put Jasper under a national spotlight and lured the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers, among others, to try to exploit the notoriety of the case which continues — many say unfairly — to brand Jasper more than a decade later.
King was tried first, in Jasper. Brewer's trial was moved 150 miles away to Bryan. Berry was tried back in Jasper. DNA showed Byrd's blood on all three of them.
Brewer was from Sulphur Springs, about 180 miles to the northwest, and had been convicted of cocaine possession. He met King, a convicted burglar from Jasper, in a Texas prison where they got involved in a KKK splinter group known as the Confederate Knights of America and adorned themselves with racist tattoos. Evidence showed Brewer had violated parole and was involved in a number of burglaries and thefts in the Jasper area.
King had become friends with Berry and moved into Berry's place. Evidence showed Brewer came to Jasper to stay with them.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/james-byrd-jr-murder-white-supremacist-set-die-14569195 [with comments]
===
Troy Davis maintains innocence in final words
The Associated Press | September 21, 2011 11:54 PM EST |
Georgia inmate Troy Davis was defiant to the end, proclaiming his innocence in the 1989 slaying of off-duty Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail.
Here are his final words, as witnessed by an Associated Press reporter:
"I'd like to address the MacPhail family. Let you know, despite the situation you are in, I'm not the one who personally killed your son, your father, your brother. I am innocent.
The incident that happened that night is not my fault. I did not have a gun. All I can ask ... is that you look deeper into this case so that you really can finally see the truth.
I ask my family and friends to continue to fight this fight.
For those about to take my life, God have mercy on your souls. And may God bless your souls."
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20110921/us-georgia-execution-last-words-glance/
===
RIP Troy Davis
www.amnestyusa.org/sites/default/files/images/troy150x.jpg
The state of Georgia shamefully executed Troy Davis on September 21, 2011 despite serious doubts about his guilt. But our fight to abolish the death penalty lives on.
Take a stand for Troy Davis. Pledge to fight to abolish the death penalty [ http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/site/c.6oJCLQPAJiJUG/b.7741827/k.62FF/Not_in_my_Name_Pledge/apps/ka/ct/contactus.asp ].
[more]
© 2011 Amnesty International USA
http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/cases/usa-troy-davis?id=1011343
===
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Lawrence Russell Brewer, of Sulpher Springs, Texas,shown in a picture released by the authorities June 9, 1998.
Credit: Reuters/STR New
By Karen Brooks
AUSTIN, Texas | Wed Sep 21, 2011 10:45am EDT
AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - As Texas prepares to execute one of his father's killers, Ross Byrd hopes the state shows the man the mercy his father, James Byrd Jr., never got when he was dragged behind a truck to his death.
"You can't fight murder with murder," Ross Byrd, 32, told Reuters late Tuesday, the night before Wednesday's scheduled execution of Lawrence Russell Brewer for one of the most notorious hate crimes in modern times.
"Life in prison would have been fine. I know he can't hurt my daddy anymore. I wish the state would take in mind that this isn't what we want."
Brewer is scheduled to die by lethal injection after 6 p.m. local time in Huntsville, Texas.
His pending execution comes 10 years after Governor Rick Perry signed into law the James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act, strengthening punishments for hate crimes.
An avowed white supremacist, Brewer, 44, was one of three white men convicted of capital murder in the kidnapping and killing of Byrd Jr., in June 1998.
John King, another white supremacist, is on death row awaiting an execution date. Shawn Berry is serving a life sentence.
Brewer would be the 11th man executed in Texas this year. In Georgia, the execution of Troy Davis, convicted of killing a police officer, is scheduled for the same night.
If both executions go forward, Brewer and Davis would be the 34th and 35th executions in the United States in 2011.
In Texas, a vigil in Huntsville began at midnight with civil rights activist Dick Gregory.
PROTESTS
Gregory has joined Ross Byrd and Martin Luther King III in the past to publicly protest Brewer's execution.
Ross Byrd, a recording artist studying for his MBA at nearby Stephen F. Austin University, said Tuesday that he wouldn't attend the execution but will "be there in spirit."
He says he doesn't want to "waste my time" watching anybody die, even a man who killed his dad.
"Life goes on," said Byrd, who has a son. "I've got responsibilities that I have every day. It's not on the front page of my mind. I'm looking for happy times."
In a crime that touched off a nationwide effort to tighten punishments for hate crimes, Brewer, King and Berry were convicted of offering Byrd Jr. a ride on his way home from a party, and then attacking him while they were standing outside the truck smoking on a country road near Jasper, Texas, according to a report by the Texas Attorney General's Office.
They beat him, and then chained his legs to the back of their pick-up and dragged him for several miles, the report said. By the time they stopped, his head and arm had been ripped off. They left his body on the country road.
Brewer maintained his innocence, saying Berry had killed Byrd Jr. by cutting his throat. But prosecutors said Brewer and King were prison buddies bent on starting a racist organization in Jasper and "intended the killing to be a signal that his (King's) racist organization was up and running."
The crime touched off a firestorm of support in Texas and the United States for laws that would enhance punishments for crimes motivated by race, religion, color, disability, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry.
The jury sentenced the three men as the nation was still reeling from a second hate crime that same year -- the October 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, beaten and left to die on a fence in Wyoming because he was gay.
'WATERSHED MOMENT'
In 2001, Texas passed its hate crimes bill named after Byrd Jr., and its symbolic signing by Perry was a "watershed moment" in Texas and one of Perry's "finest moments in office," said Texas state Senator Rodney Ellis, a Houston Democrat, who helped move the bill through the Texas Senate in spite of staunch Republican opposition.
Eight years later, President Obama signed into law a similar federal bill named after Byrd Jr. and Shepard.
"James Byrd's murder certainly changed Texas and, in many ways, the nation," Ellis told Reuters.
"It was a wake-up call that evil and hate, while no longer considered mainstream views, are more prevalent and virulent than we pretend."
Ellis said the death sentence in Brewer's case "will close a chapter in this tragic story."
"I cannot say for certain that it is a requirement in order for justice to be served but, as Mr. Brewer was a ringleader in the most brutal hate crime in the post-Civil Rights era, it is certainly a very appropriate sentence," he said.
Unlike Byrd's children and wife, all of whom oppose the use of the death penalty against his killers, other family members have been supportive of it.
"I'm not down on them at all for the fact that they support the death penalty," said David Atwood, a good friend of Ross Byrd's and founder of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. "They've gone through a traumatic experience, and there's a history in our country of horrible things happening to African Americans, so it's understandable that a number of them would say finally we're getting some justice."
He called Ross Byrd's stand "powerful."
Byrd says the execution of Brewer is simply another expression of the hate shown toward his father on that dark night in 1998. Everybody, he said, including the government, should choose not to continue that cycle.
"Everybody's in that position," he said. "And I hope they will stand back and look at it before they go down that road of hate. Like Ghandi said, an eye for an eye, and the whole world will go blind."
(Editing by Jerry Norton)
Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/21/us-texas-execution-son-idUSTRE78K35B20110921 [with comments]
*
again, in particular, (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=67110145 and preceding (and any future following)
===
White Supremacist Executed for Texas Dragging
This undated handout photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows Lawrence Russell Brewer.
(Texas Department of Criminal Justice/AP Photo)
FILE - James Byrd Jr., shown in this 1997 family photo, was tied to a truck and dragged to his death along a rural East Texas road early Sunday, June 7, 1998, near Jasper, Texas. Lawrence Russell Brewer, 44, one of two purported white supremacists condemned for Byrd’s death, is set for execution Wednesday for participating in chaining Byrd to the back of a pickup truck, dragging the black man along the road and dumping what was left of his shredded body outside a black church and cemetery.
(AP Photo/Byrd Family Photo, File)
By MICHAEL GRACZYK Associated Press
HUNTSVILLE, Texas September 21, 2011 (AP)
White supremacist gang member Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed Wednesday evening for the infamous dragging death slaying of James Byrd Jr., a black man from East Texas.
Byrd, 49, was chained to the back of a pickup truck and pulled whip-like to his death along a bumpy asphalt road in one of the most grisly hate crime murders in recent Texas history.
Brewer, 44, was asked if he had any final words, to which he replied: "No. I have no final statement."
He glanced at his parents watching through a nearby window, took several deep breaths and closed his eyes. A single tear hung on the edge of his right eye as he was pronounced dead at 6:21 p.m., 10 minutes after the lethal drugs began flowing into his arms, both covered with intricate black tattoos.
Byrd's sisters also were among the witnesses in an adjacent room.
"Hopefully, today's execution of Brewer can remind all of us that racial hatred and prejudice leads to terrible consequence for the victim, the victim's family, for the perpetrator and for the perpetrator's family," Clara Taylor, one of Byrd's sisters, said.
She called the punishment "a step in the right direction."
"We're making progress," Taylor said. "I know he was guilty so I have no qualms about the death penalty."
Appeals to the courts for Brewer were exhausted and no last-day attempts to save his life were filed.
Besides Brewer, John William King, now 36, also was convicted of capital murder and sent to death row for Byrd's death, which shocked the nation for its brutality. King's conviction and death sentence remain under appeal. A third man, Shawn Berry, 36, received a life prison term.
"One down and one to go," Billy Rowles, the retired Jasper County sheriff who first investigated the horrific scene, said. "That's kind of cruel but that's reality."
It was about 2:30 a.m. on a Sunday, June 7, 1998, when witnesses saw Byrd walking on a road not far from his home in Jasper, a town of more than 7,000 about 125 miles northeast of Houston. Many folks knew he lived off disability checks, couldn't afford his own car and walked where he needed to go. Another witness then saw him riding in the bed of a dark pickup.
Six hours later and some 10 miles away on Huff Creek Road, the bloody mess found after daybreak was thought at first to be animal road kill. Rowles, a former Texas state trooper who had taken office as sheriff the previous year, believed it was a hit-and-run fatality but evidence didn't match up with someone caught beneath a vehicle. Body parts were scattered and the blood trail began with footprints at what appeared to be the scene of a scuffle.
"I didn't go down that road too far before I knew this was going to be a bad deal," he said at Brewer's trial.
Fingerprints taken from the headless torso identified the victim as Byrd.
Testimony showed the three men and Byrd drove out into the county about 10 miles and stopped along an isolated logging road. A fight broke out and the outnumbered Byrd was tied to the truck bumper with a 24½-foot logging chain. Three miles later, what was left of his shredded remains was dumped between a black church and cemetery where the pavement ended on the remote road.
Brewer, King and Berry were in custody by the end of the next day.
The crime put Jasper under a national spotlight and lured the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers, among others, to try to exploit the notoriety of the case which continues — many say unfairly — to brand Jasper more than a decade later.
King was tried first, in Jasper. Brewer's trial was moved 150 miles away to Bryan. Berry was tried back in Jasper. DNA showed Byrd's blood on all three of them.
Brewer was from Sulphur Springs, about 180 miles to the northwest, and had been convicted of cocaine possession. He met King, a convicted burglar from Jasper, in a Texas prison where they got involved in a KKK splinter group known as the Confederate Knights of America and adorned themselves with racist tattoos. Evidence showed Brewer had violated parole and was involved in a number of burglaries and thefts in the Jasper area.
King had become friends with Berry and moved into Berry's place. Evidence showed Brewer came to Jasper to stay with them.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/james-byrd-jr-murder-white-supremacist-set-die-14569195 [with comments]
===
Troy Davis maintains innocence in final words
The Associated Press | September 21, 2011 11:54 PM EST |
Georgia inmate Troy Davis was defiant to the end, proclaiming his innocence in the 1989 slaying of off-duty Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail.
Here are his final words, as witnessed by an Associated Press reporter:
"I'd like to address the MacPhail family. Let you know, despite the situation you are in, I'm not the one who personally killed your son, your father, your brother. I am innocent.
The incident that happened that night is not my fault. I did not have a gun. All I can ask ... is that you look deeper into this case so that you really can finally see the truth.
I ask my family and friends to continue to fight this fight.
For those about to take my life, God have mercy on your souls. And may God bless your souls."
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20110921/us-georgia-execution-last-words-glance/
===
RIP Troy Davis
www.amnestyusa.org/sites/default/files/images/troy150x.jpg
The state of Georgia shamefully executed Troy Davis on September 21, 2011 despite serious doubts about his guilt. But our fight to abolish the death penalty lives on.
Take a stand for Troy Davis. Pledge to fight to abolish the death penalty [ http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/site/c.6oJCLQPAJiJUG/b.7741827/k.62FF/Not_in_my_Name_Pledge/apps/ka/ct/contactus.asp ].
[more]
© 2011 Amnesty International USA
http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/cases/usa-troy-davis?id=1011343
===
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
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