When John William King shackled James Byrd Jr’s legs to his truck, he was reported to have said, “We’re going to start The Turner Diaries early.” Now, he lies on a slab after being executed for killing him.

HUNTSVILLE, TX John William King, one of three White ex-convicts convicted of killing Byrd, a Black man, by dragging him behind a truck in Jasper, Texas almost 21 years ago, became the second person executed for the murder tonight.

According to reports, King, 44, an avowed White supremacist that had racist and neo-Nazi tattoos on his body, was administered a lethal injection and was pronounced dead at 7:08 PM CDT. He did not request a spiritual adviser nor did he want any witnesses on his behalf. Two of Byrd’s sisters and a niece witnessed the execution.

On June 7, 1998. King, along with two other White supremacists, Shawn Allen Berry and Lawrence Russell Brewer were driving a pickup truck when they offered a ride home to Byrd who they encountered on the road. Instead of driving him home however, the three took Byrd to a remote county road out of town, beat him severely, urinated and defecated on him, and chained him by his ankles to their pickup truck before dragging him for about 3 miles, dumping his mutilated remains just outside a Black church in Jasper.

The murder prompted widespread condemnation and calls to enact hate crime laws, which was done when the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was passed and signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2009. The law which is named not just for Byrd but also for Matthew Shepard, a gay man who was tortured and murdered in Laramie, Colorado just four months after Byrd was killed.  

Just over two weeks after the murder, a Klan rally was held in Jasper, with armed members of the Black Muslims and the New Black Panther Party counter-demonstrating against them. King and Brewer was reputed members of a Klan prison group while they were incarcerated.

Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed by lethal injection in 2011 while Shawn Allen Berry, who was driving the pickup truck and claimed that King and Brewer were the ones responsible for the murder, was sentenced to life in prison.

Over the years, King has suggested the killing was not a hate crime, but rather a drug deal gone bad involving his co-defendants. Meanwhile, King’s attorneys asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt his execution, maintaining that King’s trial lawyers violated his constitutional rights by not presenting his claims of innocence and conceding his guilt, but it was denied. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected the request on Monday rejected a similar request to stop the execution and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles turned down King’s request for either a commutation of his sentence or a 120-day reprieve.

Ross Byrd, the only son of James Byrd Jr., has been involved with “Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation”, an organization that opposes capital punishment. He has campaigned to spare the lives of those who murdered his father, saying the night before Brewer was executed, “You can’t fight murder with murder.” There were a gathering of anti-death penalty protesters outside the prison, some representing a group called the Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement, as the execution was carried out.

Happening now in Huntsville where protestors have gathered to oppose the lethal injection at 6 pm of John William King Jr for the 1998 racially-motivated dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper TX pic.twitter.com/5bR1906Ebl

— Rusty Surette (@KBTXRusty) April 24, 2019