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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
The Byrds harbor deep resentments over the Texas governor's treatment of their family and failure to support a hate crimes bill.
Oct 16, 2000 | Louvon Harris was walking through her modest Houston living room last Wednesday night, not really paying much attention to the second presidential debate on TV, when she heard Vice President Al Gore mention her brother's name.
"I kind of stopped," she says.
The subject was racial profiling, but Gore had changed the subject to hate crimes.
"James Byrd was singled out because of his race in Texas, and other Americans have been singled out because of their race or ethnicity," Gore said, referring to the death of James Byrd Jr., who was chained to a truck and dragged three miles to his death in June 1998 at age 49. By the time his torso was ditched at one of Jasper County's oldest black cemeteries, Byrd's head had been severed.
A hate crimes law would punish criminals for crimes rooted in prejudice, Gore said. "I think these crimes are different. I think they're different because they're based on prejudice and hatred which gives rise to crimes that have not a single victim but are intended to dehumanize a whole group of people," Gore argued. Gore pointed out that Gov. George W. Bush had let a hate crimes bill die in a Texas Senate committee.
That's when Bush responded -- and when Harris got "emotional."
Bush said Texas already had a hate crimes statute, and nothing more was needed, since Texas laws were tough on criminals regardless of the ethnicity of their victims.
"The three men who murdered James Byrd, guess what's going to happen to them?" Bush said, smiling. "They'll be put to death. A jury found them guilty. It will be hard to punish them any worse after they get put to death." In actuality, two of Byrd's three murderers -- John William King and Lawrence Russell Brewer -- have been sentenced to death, while the third, Shawn Allen Berry, was sentenced to life in prison, and will be eligible for parole after 40 years.
Reached over the weekend, members of the Byrd family said that they weren't surprised Bush got the details of the case wrong. Unlike other Texas public officials -- they cite local mayors, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and President Clinton -- Bush was never remotely comforting to their family after Byrd's grisly murder, they say.
"I wasn't surprised that he didn't know," says one of Byrd's younger sisters, Betty Boatner, 46. "I wasn't surprised at all."
Bush "should have known" the details of the trial, says Stella Byrd, James Byrd Jr.'s mother. "But I wasn't surprised about his reaction." She says Bush showed no concern when her granddaughter talked to him in May 1999 to try to persuade Bush to support the James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act, which would have increased punishment for criminals motivated by hatred of a victim's gender, religion, ethnic background or sexual orientation. "So I'm sure with that lack of interest, he didn't ask to see what was going on."
The Byrd family, however, seems most angry with Bush for his opposition to the hate crimes law Democratic state legislators named after Byrd. They slam him for not supporting it -- as will an ad coming out this week sponsored by the NAACP National Voter Fund. The Byrd family also plans to vote for Gore.
But while the Byrds may have plenty of reasons to resent Bush, the Jasper County prosecutor who tried Byrd's killers says that even had the James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act been at his disposal, the outcome would likely not have changed. The law would not have affected his ability to seek capital punishment for any of the three men, he says, and thus its relevance is questionable. How Bush treated the Byrds according to the family, however, is certainly something that the Democrats would do well to publicize.
