Victim's son objects as Texas sets execution in hate crime death
Vigil held for U.S. death row inmate
By Karen Brooks
AUSTIN, Texas | Wed Sep 21, 2011 10:45am EDT
(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.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/21/us-texas-execution-son-idUSTRE78K35B20110921
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