2nd Guilty Verdict Reached in Dragging Murder

HOUSTON — The second man to stand trial in last year’s gruesome dragging death of a black man in Jasper, Texas, was found guilty of murder Monday--despite depicting himself as a hapless peacemaker who actually had tried to save James Byrd Jr.

Immediately after issuing its verdict, the jury of 11 whites and one Latino began considering whether Lawrence Russell Brewer, 32, should be sentenced to life in prison or to death.

“Clearly there is a pattern of deceit,” Jasper County District Atty. Guy James Gray said of Brewer’s account of the night Byrd was chained to a pickup truck and dragged until his body came apart. “There were three men out there and they were all active participants and they’re all equally guilty.”

Prosecutors maintain that Brewer, 24-year-old John William King and Shawn Berry, also 24, kidnapped, beat and then dragged Bryd to death to promote their prison-based white supremacist group. King was convicted earlier this year, and is now on death row. Berry is scheduled to be tried next month.

“I want to see the ultimate penalty,” Mary Verrett, Byrd’s sister, said after emerging from the courthouse Monday. “I can’t begin to describe how good we feel.”

Brewer was tried in the town of Bryan, about 150 miles from Jasper. Prosecutors had requested the change of venue, citing the enormous publicity Jasper attracted during King’s trial in February.

Nestled in a forested area of east Texas once known for its racist violence, Jasper struggled to reclaim its reputation after the murder. As Ku Klux Klan and black groups converged on the town before King’s trial, officials in Jasper launched surveys, encounter groups and church services to shore up racial unity.

During his trial, Brewer testified that he had been in the pickup that night, but thought Byrd was already dead. Berry, he said, had slashed Byrd’s throat with a knife. But no knife was found near the crime scene, police said, nor was there evidence of a knife wound on Byrd’s battered remains.

Weeping at autopsy photos, Brewer also maintained that he had urged his friends to release the chained Byrd from the truck. He couldn’t explain, however, why the dead man’s blood speckled his shoes, responding simply: “That is a very good question.”

Brewer also denied writing violent, white supremacist notes while in prison.

Witnesses at his trial described Brewer as the “Exalted Cyclops” of a supremacist group while he was in prison for parole violations in the mid-1990s. King, also behind bars at the time, was Brewer’s protege in the group, Gray told jurors.

“He’s a racist and a white supremacist just exactly like Bill King. The mind-set’s the same,” Gray said.

Prosecutors detailed an array of racially themed tattoos and quotations from Brewer’s prison notes. “I did it,” Brewer wrote to a companion at state prison. “And no longer am I a virgin. It was a rush and I’m still licking my lips for more.”

According to a gang specialist from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, those words were jailhouse jargon for “stating he’s physically assaulted a member of the black race.”

But Brewer’s defense attorneys, Doug Barlow and Layne Walker, disputed that interpretation, saying instead that Brewer was talking about sex.

Arguing that there was not enough evidence to refute Brewer’s account, Walker said prosecutors were forced to focus on the incendiary racial views Brewer espoused in prison--views Brewer claimed he only assumed as a means of self-defense.

“They did a good job of making you hate Russell Brewer and what they seem to think he stands for,” Walker said. “There is a tremendous amount of pressure for a conviction in this case. You know it, I know it, and they know it. But you cannot leap and make assumptions” about Brewer’s guilt.”

Bill Hale, executive director of the Texas Commission on Human Rights, said Brewer’s conviction served notice that racial terrorists are active and well in this country.

“If these two trials help the general population understand that there is a white supremacy movement, and that it’s dangerous . . . that’s essential to our future as a country,” he said.

He also warned that the same verdicts elevated racial terrorists in the eyes of their own companions.

“To the white supremacy movement in the United States,” he said, “they’ve just convicted a martyr.”

In Jasper, hotel owner David Stiles voiced relief at Monday’s verdict--and hope that it might help dilute the town’s tainted image.

“Everyone’s working hard to overcome the stigma,” Stiles said. “I feel like justice has been done. . . [the defendants] don’t represent the true character of Jasper.”

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Times researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this story.