Texas has executed John William King (pictured), one of three men convicted of the brutal lynching of James Byrd, Jr., after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene in his case. King's lawyers had asked the Court to grant a stay of his scheduled April 24, 2019 execution after a divided Texas Court of Criminal Appeals voted 5-4 on April 22 to permit the execution to proceed. King, an avowed white supremacist, had maintained since the time of his arrest that he was not present at the time of King's murder and did not participate in the killing, and he had repeatedly but unsuccessfully demanded that his lawyers present an innocence defense at trial. King’s appeal lawyers had asked the Texas appeals court and the Supreme Court to halt his execution to review King’s claim that his lawyers’ actions denied King the assistance of counsel guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment.

King says he left Byrd and his co-defendants, Lawrence Russell Brewer and Shawn Berry, prior to Byrd’s murder. When King’s trial lawyers decided to concede his guilt, he tried to replace them. He wrote letters to the court and to a Dallas newspaper describing his innocence claims and complaining that his attorneys would not present them. King’s appellate attorneys argued that his trial lawyers’ concession of guilt violated the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in McCoy v. Louisiana, which said, “With individual liberty—and, in capital cases, life—at stake, it is the defendant’s prerogative, not counsel’s, to decide on the objective of his defense: to admit guilt in the hope of gaining mercy at the sentencing stage, or to maintain his innocence, leaving it to the State to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” The Texas appeals court dismissed King’s application for review without addressing the merits of his claim.

Judge Michael Keasler, joined by three other judges, dissented, citing “substantial” unresolved factual and legal questions. Judge Keasler wrote: “A death-sentenced man who has asserted his innocence since his capital-murder trial has asked us to review his claim that his trial lawyer overrode his express wishes to pursue a defense consistent with his innocence. In light of … the horrible stain this Court’s reputation would suffer if King’s claims of innocence are one day vindicated (or, perhaps, if the Supreme Court eventually decides that McCoy should apply retroactively), I think we ought to take our time and decide this issue unhurriedly. I would grant the stay.” The U.S. Supreme Court denied King's stay application without comment.

Ahead of King’s execution date, the Beaumont Enterprise interviewed community members in Jasper, Texas to understand how King, who grew up in the same small town as Byrd, came to be associated with one of the nation’s most notorious hate crimes. Capt. James Carter, a black man who worked for the Jasper County Sheriff’s Office for 30 years, has known King since he was a child. “My boys liked him,” Carter said. “He came and spent the night with us often. I treated him like my own.” When Byrd was killed, Carter and his boss had to tell Byrd’s family. Ronald King, John William King’s father, struggled to understand how his son became a white supremacist, and linked the change to time his son spent in prison for a series of burglaries he committed at age 20. “Something happened to my boy in prison. Something bad,” Ronald King had told his priest, Rev. Ron Foshage. “He never had this kind of hate in his heart.” While in prison, the Reverend said, King had been sexually assaulted by an African-American prisoner.

Byrd’s family did not blame King’s family for the murder, and showed kindness to Ronald during the trial. According to Foshage, “Every day after the trial had ended for the day, Mr. Byrd and other members of the Byrd family would touch Ronald on the arm as they were leaving. He was so grateful for their kindness.” “We as parents raise our children to do the right thing and not hate,” said Louvon Harris, James Byrd Jr.’s older sister. “But once they’re not in your control anymore, we’re not sure what kids will grow up to be. ...There were no winners in this. We felt their pain, as well.” Shortly before the trial, Jasper residents gathered to tear down a fence separating racially segregated sections of the town cemetery. According to the Enterprise, if King chose to have his body returned to Jasper after the execution, “he’ll be buried next to his parents and just 100 yards from James Byrd Jr.”

(Monique Batson, King’s fate rests with Supreme Court, Beaumont Enterprise, April 24, 2019; Jolie McCullough, Texas execution set for John William King in racist dragging death of James Byrd Jr., The Texas Tribune, April 24, 2019; Monique Batson and Andrea Whitney, Clues, but no firm answers in King’s path to infamy, Beaumont Enterprise, April 23, 2019.) Read the court rulings in King’s appeal to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the pleadings filed in the U.S. Supreme Court. See U.S. Supreme Court, Executions, and Representation. [Story updated to reflect that the U.S. Supreme Court denied King's application for a stay and that Texas carried out the execution as scheduled.]

At least five people were exonerated in 2018 after having been wrongfully convicted in cases that involved the misuse or threatened use of the death penalty, a DPIC analysis of data accompanying a new report by the National Registry of Exonerations has shown. The National Registry’s annual report on wrongful convictions, Exonerations in 2018, recorded a record 151 new exonerations across the United States in 2018, including 68 exonerations resulting from wrongful homicide convictions. Two of those exonerations freed death-row prisoners Vicente Benavides and Clemente Aguirre.

A record number of the exonerations in 2018 were the product of wrongful convictions obtained by police and/or prosecutorial misconduct (107) or perjury/false accusation (111), with both often occurring in combination. The two also were the leading factors contributing to wrongful homicide convictions, 79.4% of which involved police and/or prosecutorial misconduct (54 cases) and 76.5% of which involved perjury/false accusation (52 cases). Historically, those two factors are the leading causes of wrongful capital convictions. Both were present in more than two-thirds of the homicide exonerations (47 cases, 69.1%) in 2018, including the wrongful capital convictions of Benavides and Aquirre. DNA evidence helped to exonerate 14 of those wrongfully convicted of homicide in 2018, only 20.1% of homicide exonerations. The prosecution presented perjured testimony or false witness accusations in all of the murder cases involving DNA, and police and/or prosecutorial misconduct was also present in more than 60% of those cases. DNA helped to rebut false or misleading forensic evidence presented by the prosecution in five of the homicide exonerations.

At least three other homicide exonerations in 2018 involved the wrongful use or threat of the death penalty. Bobby Joe Maxwell was capitally prosecuted in Los Angeles, California for a series of ten murders and five robberies attributed to the “Skid Row Stabber” in 1978 and 1979. No physical evidence directly linked Maxwell to the murders and witnesses failed to identify him or his voice in police lineups. He won a new trial in 2010 after new evidence exposed the prosecution’s prison informant as a “serial liar.” The prosecution dropped charges against Maxwell after he suffered a heart attack that left him comatose. Matthew Sopron was convicted of a double murder and sentenced to life without parole in 1998 in Chicago, Illinois after an 18-year-old prosecution witness falsely implicated him after having been threatened with the death penalty. William Bigeck subsequently admitted that Sopron “had absolutely nothing to do with the murders” and testified in post-conviction proceedings in 2018 that he would have done anything to avoid the death penalty and that he had changed his initial statement to obtain a plea deal that took the death penalty off the table. Daniel Villegas was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in El Paso, Texas in August 1995 for a drive-by double murder. The 16-year-old falsely confessed to the murders after a police detective handcuffed him to a chair, threatened to take him to the desert and “beat his ass,” slapped him, and said he would die in the electric chair if he didn’t confess. “[T]errified out of his mind,” Villegas confessed. The Texas state courts overturned the conviction in 2012, citing ineffective assistance of counsel. Presenting evidence of innocence at his third trial, Villegas was acquitted in October 2018.

(National Registry of Exonerations, Exonerations in 2018, April 9, 2019; DPIC ANALYSIS: 2018 Exoneration Report Shows Official Misconduct and Perjury Remain Leading Causes of Wrongful Homicide Convictions, Death Penalty Information Center, April 23, 2019.) See Innocence and Prosecutorial Misconduct.