White supremacist executed in Texas, 20 years on from black man’s torture and murder

The first white man in Texas to be convicted of the murder of a black man was executed on Wednesday night, after 20 years on death row.

John William King, a 44-year-old white supremacist, was put to death in the Texas death chamber in Huntsville with a dose of pentobarbital.

He declined to give any last words, but he prepared a statement in advance, saying: “Capital Punishment: Them without the capital get the punishment.”

King, an ex-convict who had decorated his body in racist tattoos including one of a black man hanging in a noose, was convicted of the murder of 49-year-old James Byrd Jr in the town of Jasper, Texas.

King and two other white men attacked Byrd early one Sunday morning in 1998, after offering him a ride home.

The men beat him, spray-painted his face, chained him to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him to his death on an isolated back road.

Louvon Harris, a sister of Byrd’s who planned to attend the execution, said on Tuesday that King’s death by lethal injection would not compare to the way he had tortured her brother.

“He’s not going through any pain,” she said. “He’s not chained and bound and dragged on a concrete road, swinging back and forth like a sack of potatoes, with an arm coming off and being decapitated or nothing like that.

“When you look at it at that angle, I don’t have sympathy.”

Less than a year after the killing, King became the first white man in modern Texas history to be sentenced to death for killing a black person.

One of King’s accomplices, Lawrence Russell Brewer, was handed a death sentence after King and was executed before him, in 2011.

Shawn Allen Berry, the third man involved in the killing, was spared the death penalty but is not up for parole until 2038.