In five pages this paper discusses this Jasper, Texas murder case and its racial hate crime implications. Six sources are cited in the bibliography.
Name of Research Paper File: D0_TJTexas1.rtf
Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
of the Ku Klux Klan in many parts of the southern United States. The investigators were originally misled by one of the suspects in the case but eventually came to
the realization that three white men were responsible for the grisly death of a black man for the only reason being he was black.
On June 7, 1998, the murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas unveiled many different stories of racial hatred in the small town. From all accounts of what happened,
James Byrd, a black man was dragged by chains behind a truck for three miles until he was decapitated. Three white men were charged with the murder of James Byrd
the only reason being that James Byrd was a black man and in the wrong place at the wrong time. Chief District Attorney Pat (Hawk) Hardy said that "this was
a crime of opportunity. The killers had nothing against Byrd, except that he was black. If they had found some other black somewhere else, they would have killed him" (Dorman,
1998). While James Byrd attended some gatherings that night of friends and relatives, the three white men charged with his murder, John William
(Bill) King, a building erector who had spent some time in prison for burglary, Lawrence Brewer, who had served seven years for a cocaine conviction, and Shawn Allen Berry, who
was a movie theatre employee but who had been arrested and imprisoned for theft, were sitting around their apartment. King and Brewer had Aryan Nation tattoos and had been described
as expressing white-supremacist views orally and in letters (Dorman, 1998). In Berrys confession he related that the men decided to go out