Trial Two In Dragging Death
Dragging death murder defendant and white supremacist group leader Lawrence Russell Brewer was so proud of his participation in the gruesome killing of a black East Texas man last year that he wrote about it, prosecutors said Monday.
"This man has written how he sees himself after this murder," Jasper County District Attorney Guy James Gray said as trial for Lawrence Russell Brewer got under way. "He sees himself as a hero, a star, that he's really accomplished. It's really a kind of weird mind-set."
Brewer, 32, is the second of three white men charged with killing James Byrd Jr., 49, by dragging him behind a pickup truck. The other two are John William King and Sean Allen Berry, both 24. King was convicted; Berry is awaiting trial.
The Brazos County jury to decide Brewer's guilt will be comprised of seven white men, five white women, and two Hispanic males, reports CBS News This Morning Correspondent Bob McNamara. Two of the jurors are alternates.
But despite the jury's racial composition, Prosecutor Brit Featherston says it has the evidence to convict: "I don't think it will be a problem," he says. "We would like to have a jury made up of the entire spectrum of the community. However, sometimes that's just not the way it happens."
King, the first to go to trial, was convicted and sentenced to death in February by a Jasper County jury. But unlike King, whom prosecutors call satanic, Brewer will be portrayed as a racist.
"[He was] a little more Klannish and deeper into Christian identity, Turner diaries, just a little more into the gang world," says prosecutor Guy James.
If convicted, Brewer could face the death penalty. But his attorney was noncommittal about the jury's racial numbers.
"Jury selection is a very important part of any trial, any litigation, and that part is completed and now we look forward to the presentation of the testimony," says defense attorney Doug Barlow.
Brewer, King and Berry were accused of beating their victim unconscious, chaining him to the bumper of Berry's pickup truck and dragging him three-and-a-half miles to his death along a country road outside of Jasper.
Byrd's head and right arm had been severed from his body when it was found on the morning of June 7, 1998, some seven hours after the three men picked up Byrd along Martin Luther King Drive and offered to give him a ride to a nearby restaurant.
Brewer and the others were tied to the crime by DNA evidence recovered from cigarettes found near the site where the three are thought to have beaten Byrd. Berry claims Brewer bruised his right big toe by kicking Byrd and also coated Byrd's face with black spray paint during the killing.
Prosecutors said they believe the three men killed Byrd to promote their fledgling white supremacist organization and initiate Berry into the group.
"In this country it's not illegal to hate somebody," Gray said Monday. "he same law that allows you to go to church on Sunday allows you to hate. It is, however, illegal to use acts of racial violence to oppress blacks or further a cause."
Barlow entered an innocent plea after the capital murder indictment against his client was read Monday morning, but declined to make an opening statement to the jury.