jasper

The New Republic

DID THE TEXAS PENAL SYSTEM KILL JAMES BYRD?

Prisoner's Dilemma

by Michael Berryhill
Post date 12.09.99 | Issue date 12.27.99

Sometimes a crime is so despicable that it defines, at least for a time, the place where it occurs. Think of Oklahoma City, or Littleton, Colorado--or Jasper, an East Texas logging town where, in June of last year, a black man named James Byrd Jr. was chained by his ankles to the bumper of a pickup truck and dragged three miles down country roads. His knees and his genitalia were ground off. When he hit a culvert, his head and one shoulder were severed from his body. His corpse was deposited near the gate of a black cemetery where former slaves were buried and where some of the bodies were memorialized with spirit markers, in keeping with ancient African tradition.

The murder thrust Jasper into the national glare, and at first its moral seemed clear. The cotton and timber country of East Texas, the media noted, had always been known for its racism. During Jim Crow, most of the state's lynchings took place there. One of the last bastions of the Ku Klux Klan had its headquarters in Vidor, 70 miles south of Jasper. It wasn't hard to see what the Jasper killing meant. It meant that, in the poor, hick towns of the Deep South, white people hadn't really changed.

Then, over time, the story shifted. Two days after the murder, Jasper County Sheriff Billy Rowles picked up three local white men: John William King, Lawrence Russell Brewer, and Shawn Berry. A judge refused to move the first case, King's, from Jasper, saying the town could deal with its own. By February of this year, an almost entirely white jury of townspeople had convicted King of murder and sentenced him to death, making him only the second white man in Texas history to be given the death penalty for the murder of an African American. After the verdict was announced, Rowles, a slow-talking white man in his fifties, embraced Byrd's son before the cameras. A TV reporter who covered King's trial told me he felt something "almost spiritual" upon hearing that King had been condemned to death. Jasper was not the Old South after all.

Two more trials and two more convictions followed, with Brewer also getting the death penalty and Berry receiving a life sentence just a few weeks ago. Now Jasper is receding from sight. The town, too, had been on trial, and, to the surprise of many, it has been found innocent. By moving so swiftly and decisively to find the killers and bring them to justice, Jasper proved it was not responsible for King and Brewer and Berry, after all. With the morality play resolved, the national media has gone home, leaving just one question, a question no one seemed to want to ask: If Jasper did not create the killers of James Byrd, what did?

Although Bill King, Russell Brewer, and Shawn Berry were all convicted of James Byrd's murder, it eventually became apparent that Berry's role had been markedly different from King's or Brewer's. Even the prosecution admitted that Berry was not a racist. Indeed, at his trial, several black coworkers testified that Berry had had good relations with them. Berry was, however, a high school friend of King's. That's why King and Brewer, an old friend of King's from prison, were in Berry's truck the night they picked up Byrd, who had been hitchhiking. Berry said King and Brewer ordered him to stop the truck on a remote dirt road, whereupon they pulled Byrd out of the cab and began beating him. Paralyzed with fear, Berry said, he wet his pants and did nothing to stop them.

In contrast to Berry, both King and Brewer were avowed white supremacists, their bodies covered with racist tattoos. They didn't get the tattoos in Jasper; they got them in prison. While Berry, as a teenager, had been arrested along with King for stealing cigarettes from a warehouse, he had served time only in a boot camp for young offenders. After that, Berry kept his nose clean and stayed out of jail. King, on the other hand, violated his probation and was soon sent to prison, where he met Brewer. It was that experience that made King and Brewer the men they are today. Three working-class white men grew up in small East Texas towns at about the same time and under similar conditions. Two went into Texas prisons, and one did not. And the two who did came out monsters.

King and Brewer called themselves "woods." In the racial war that goes on in Texas prisons, where inmates of color outnumber whites by about three to one, "wood" is short for "peckerwood." Black Southerners started using the word peckerwood to refer to poor whites some time at the end of the last century. Blacks, writes Clarence Major in his dictionary of African American slang, "saw the common blackbird as a symbol of themselves." The redheaded woodpeckers that roamed the Southern forests came to represent whites. And, just as blacks have so often appropriated the epithets of whites, whites in Texas prisons have adopted peckerwood and made it their own.

In Texas prisons, a wood is a white man who will "stay down," or fight for himself and his friends. If he's a good fighter, he is known as a "hard wood." If he caves in, goes fetal, calls for the guards, weeps, pleads, or fails to fight, he's a "ho," a whore, suitable for extortion and rape. Ho's are the lowest men in the prison hierarchy, despised by inmates and guards alike. When inmates fail to defend themselves against sexual assault, the common advice of prison authorities is to "act like a man."

King and Brewer met at the Beto unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in 1995. Beto is considered by inmates to be a "gladiator" unit: 3,000 young men in their twenties, many of them toughened by living on the streets and as members of racial gangs.

Prison victims come in all colors and sizes, of course, but young whites, prison officials and defense lawyers say, have an especially hard time. A middle-class white boy sent to prison for trying to stretch his allowance by dealing drugs or breaking into houses may have to fight day after day. He will be attacked not only because he inspires resentment but because such attacks can be lucrative. More than half of Texas inmates are broke. Although inmates are required to work in the fields, factories, and offices of Texas prisons, Texas pays them nothing for their labor. So inmates find other ways to make money. One is to sell contraband--tobacco, drugs, pornography--that is often smuggled in by the poorly paid guards. Another way is through extortion. Still another is by turning a prisoner into a ho and selling his sexual services to other inmates.

Trying to account for what happened to their client in prison, King's lawyers put a Beto inmate named John Mosley on the stand. A towering man, six-foot-three and 280 pounds, Mosley gave King many of his racist tattoos. In response to questions from King's lawyers, Mosley told the jury about a common practice in Texas prisons, known as "checking," by which inmates vet new arrivals. Asked what checking is, Mosley explained matter-of-factly, "It means you fight, fuck, or `up sixties,'" referring to the $60-a-month maximum that an inmate could at that time spend at the commissary. If an inmate gives in, he becomes a ho and can be "rented" to other prisoners, a profitable enterprise.

King never testified, and prison records indicate next to nothing about whether or how King was checked, except that he was in a scuffle on his first day, in June 1995. Whatever happened, though, it must have scared him--for he soon joined his cellmate Brewer's small white gang, the Confederate Knights of America, for protection.

Brewer, though a few years older than King, was a man much like him. A small-town burglar who sometimes stole from his own relatives, Brewer was in and out of prison for seven years. Like King, Brewer was relatively small in size and, except for his tattoos, was hardly intimidating.

During his trial, Brewer described in weeping, halting testimony how he had come to join the Confederate Knights. Soon after he arrived at Beto, in early 1994, Brewer was checked by two Hispanic gang members. The guards, he said, had ordered all the inmates in his cellblock to sit down on benches in the dayroom or be punished. It was almost as if the guards wanted to see what confrontation would transpire. Blacks held one bench, Hispanics held another, and whites occupied the third--but the whites wouldn't let Brewer sit with them. For two days, he said, he leaned against the wall. Then two Hispanic gang members asked him whether he would fight or "ride"--that is, give them money or sexual favors. Brewer said he told them he would not ride and if they were going to beat him up they should go ahead and get it over with.

As far as checking goes, Brewer had it easy--the two Hispanics never made good on their threat. Still, his fellow white inmates were sufficiently impressed with his refusal to back down that they allowed him to sit on their bench. And Brewer was soon invited to join the Confederate Knights.

The Confederate Knights was a fledgling group, in contrast to better-established white gangs at Beto such as the Aryan Circle and the Aryan Brotherhood. The Beto chapter called itself the Texas Rebel Soldiers; its members swore oaths of loyalty to the Ku Klux Klan. Prison authorities and King's lawyers say no more than a dozen inmates were members. With typical exaggeration, King bragged in a letter to a girlfriend that "not just anyone is prospected and asked to be a part of these brotherhoods. One must be one down motherfuckin' peckerwood. Any white boy who comes in and stays down for himself is a wood or peckerwood. That's when you receive your bolts [tattooed SS lighting bolts] and nickname."

In addition to the bolts, Brewer and King each acquired a multitude of racist tattoos--created by other inmates using a needle hooked to a small electrical motor pilfered from a typewriter or a light fixture. King was particularly proud of a menacing version of Woody Woodpecker dressed in a Klan robe and perched on a limb from which dangled the tiny figure of a hanged black man. He wrote to a girlfriend that he was friends with "one of the coldest skin artist[s] on this unit." "Hopefully by the time I come home," he wrote, "I'll have 65 percent of my body covered. My head, arms, neck, back, side, chest, stomach and dick. I know no one's gonna want to fuck with a ... peckerwood covered in skin art."

Being a member of the Confederate Knights meant sharing the secret password, attending meetings, acting as a lookout, hiding documents, earning points on a merit chart, and swearing to "bear true allegiance to the sacred principles of Aryan Racial Supremacy and political freedom in Government upon which our forefathers founded a new nation upon this continent." Most importantly, it gave men like King someone to call "bro" (another word, like ho and peckerwood, that prison whites took from the people they said they hated).

Misfits in the small towns where they grew up, in prison King and Brewer found a group that accepted them. Brewer cut short the visits of his Hispanic wife and son for fear of antagonizing his fellow gang members. His brothers in prison were more important, he testified. Bound by rituals, tattoos, and written oaths sealed with bloody thumbprints, they were initiates to a secret order. They had a common enemy: the "mud race."

By becoming woods, Brewer's and King's lawyers argued, the two men didn't just protect themselves from the theft of their commissary money. They protected themselves from rape. In describing his checking experience, Brewer stated that "the odds [of being raped] were against me looking like I did with no tattoos." King, however, refused to help his lawyers present fear of rape as a mitigating circumstance for his racist views. C. Haden Cribbs, one of King's lawyers, says that when he asked King if he had been sexually assaulted, King got "positively indignant" and wouldn't talk about the subject. Ultimately, the jury didn't buy the rationale, and neither, for the most part, did the press. At one of the defense team's daily news conferences, one reporter chided King's other lawyer, Brack Jones, with the comment that "[the prison] system isn't on trial."

In fact, the Texas prison system was on trial early last spring, only in a federal court and in a different city--Austin. And the evidence that surfaced in that case strongly supports the argument of Brewer's and King's lawyers.

The federal case, known simply as Ruiz, for an inmate who filed part of the original class-action suit, deals with a wide range of problems within the Texas prison system. Ruiz has been going on for more than 25 years. And in its history lies the story of how the Texas Department of Corrections created the conditions both for today's widespread sexual violence and for the system of racially segregated gangs by which inmates protect themselves from it.

Until Texas prisons were desegregated by court order in 1979, white prisoners were given certain privileges. In contrast to black inmates, who had to run to the fields in which they labored, and to Hispanics, who rode there on trailers with benches that had no backrests, the whites were taken in trailers outfitted with benches and wooden backboards for them to lean against. Even after desegregation, when whites suddenly found themselves in cellblocks where they were outnumbered by minorities, they retained a major advantage, thanks to the wardens' practice of using them as "building tenders."

While uniformed officers ran the hallways, shops, offices, and farms, the mostly white building tenders, armed with baseball bats and knives and equipped with the keys to the doors, ran the cellblocks. Guards did not enter without an escort from these men. And the other inmates were completely at their mercy. Even though the use of building tenders was outlawed in 1974, the practice continued long after that. By doing the work of guards, the building tenders saved the Texas prison system money. If some inmates were abused in the process, well, that was the cost of keeping order.

When, in the early '80s, after the Ruiz case brought the system's many abuses to light, the federal judge for the case, William Wayne Justice, ordered Texas to end the use of building tenders once and for all, among other reforms. Justice warned the state that unless it moved quickly to hire guards to replace the building tenders, prison security would be threatened. Texas failed to do so quickly enough. The resulting power vacuum was rapidly filled by racially segregated inmate gangs, each vying for control of the cellblocks.

Since initially allowing the gangs to take control, the state has failed to wrest it from them. In response to another ruling by Justice about prison overcrowding, Texas has embarked on a massive building spree during the past several years.

Meanwhile, thanks to increased federal funding for the war on drugs, the state's prison population has exploded--from 60,000 inmates in 1992 to almost 150,000 today. Because of the drug laws' disproportionate application to minorities, most of these inmates are black or Hispanic. The result is white inmates thrown into cellblocks in which they are outnumbered by minorities three to one and for which the state is unable to hire and train guards quickly enough to keep order.

Short on manpower, the guards in Texas prisons have, in effect, accepted the gangs as the new building tenders. Instead of protecting inmates from violence, they endorse the gangs' ethos, encouraging prisoners who are threatened to fight for themselves and looking down on those who do not.

Witness, for instance, the exchange between Donna Brorby, the court-appointed attorney for the inmates in Ruiz, and a prison captain who had ignored an inmate's request for protection because the prisoner had not fought his attackers:

    Q: Now, if an inmate attempts to defend himself [from a sexual assault] and he is fighting an inmate who is maybe stronger and a better fighter than he is, the consequence of that is that he'll get a beating; is that right?

    A: Probably so.

    Q: And then what's going to happen after the beating?

    A: Then that's something that helps me make my decision whether or not his allegations are actually legitimate or not.

    Q: Do you think that maybe the inmate just has a choice between having a beating and being raped versus just being--you know, he could skip the beating and go right to the rape?

    A: That's an individual choice that he can make.

    Q: But you disapprove of that choice; is that right?

    A: Yes ma'am, I would.

    Q: Because that would be consenting to sexual contact?

    A: It could be misconstrued by the inmates that are attempting to rape him. It could be misconstrued by them that he is consenting.

Not surprisingly, then, violence and rape are common occurrences in Texas prisons. Brorby certainly had no shortage of rape victims from Beto in her files. One inmate had been raped while in Beto's Mentally Retarded Offender Program and was then raped again at a psychiatric unit. Another Beto inmate testified he was raped by three prisoners he was paying for protection. Another, from a different unit, was so tired of being abused that he asked prison doctors if they could sew his anus shut. Rape and fear of rape were so prevalent, Brorby argued, that they dominated everyday life in the Texas prison system.

Yet, as Justice noted this past March, the Texas Department of Corrections keeps almost no record of sexual assaults. This, concluded Justice, is further evidence of the state's indifference to the fates of inmates. "It is difficult to believe," Justice wrote in his opinion, "that in a population of more than 140,000, there were only six confirmed cases of sexual assault in 1998. That only six inmates were eligible for punishment for sexual assault further defies credulity. It is also disturbing to learn that there are apparently no reliable system-wide statistics concerning requests for protection by inmates." As a result of this and other evidence, Justice has ruled that the Texas prison system should remain under the court's authority.

Meanwhile, membership in prison gangs continues to rise. According to Sam Buentello, chief of the Texas prison system's gang-intelligence unit, about 5,000 inmates are known to belong to officially recognized gangs, with another 10,000 suspected of gang affiliations. About 700 belong to the white supremacist groups Aryan Brotherhood or Aryan Circle. About 900 belong to either the Crips or the Bloods, the black gangs. The greatest number belong to Hispanic gangs, such as the Mexican Mafia and the Texas Syndicate. These recognized gangs elect officers, take votes, conduct courts, and execute punishments in a legalistic manner, with communications coded or sometimes hidden in legal papers that prison authorities are forbidden by law to intercept and read.

Compared to the major gangs, King and Brewer's Confederate Knights of America was small potatoes. It didn't have a written constitution, and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice termed it not a gang but a clique. Yet it clearly made an impact on both King and Brewer.

After he joined, King's letters from prison to his girlfriends became increasingly racist--and were often tinged with sexual resentment of minorities. Woods were always the victims of prison authority. Blacks and Hispanics got away with everything. "Truthfully sweetheart," he wrote, "sometimes I just feel like `fuck comeing home.' I'm better off here. I have it made in all actuality, why give it up for a world full of nothing? What do I have to look forward too returning to Jasper? A town full of race traitoring nigger loveing whores? Bitches that are so fuckin stupid and blind to the pride of their race and heritiage that they should be hung on the limb adjacent their nigger loveing man."

When they were finally released from prison in 1997, King and Brewer brought their racism home with them. When King first returned to Jasper, his old pal Shawn Berry said, he spouted racist talk and displayed his tattoos. But, according to Berry, King toned it down when he didn't get any response from Berry and his friends and started wearing long-sleeved shirts to cover up the tattoos. Then, three weeks before Byrd's murder, Brewer--who had been thrown out of the house he'd been sharing with a girlfriend in a small town north of Jasper--moved in with King.

According to Berry, when Brewer showed up, the two former cellmates returned to their prison slang and took up their old ways. When they needed a chain saw and a weed trimmer for a job clearing brush, they stole them. They took 50 bags of potato chips from a motel lobby. When they wanted beer, they broke into a warehouse and took a dozen cases. A few nights before killing Byrd, they cleaned out a restaurant's supply of frozen steaks.

They also revived their commitment to the Confederate Knights. King even wanted to start a chapter in Jasper. In his apartment, police found membership forms and a written constitution for the gang.

Berry contends he never believed King or Brewer would act on their racism, but he admits the two were outspoken about it. Indeed, on the afternoon before Byrd's murder, King had been angry about encountering blacks at two different parties at friends' homes.

Brewer and King also seemed obsessed with asserting their masculinity and repudiating homosexuality. The constitution of the Confederate Knights expressly forbids homosexuality. In prison, King had gotten a tattoo of the Disney character Tinkerbell on his penis, and he showed it off to several of Berry's friends one night at the movie theater that Berry managed. Brewer also said that on the night of the murder he and King got out of the truck and were relieving themselves in the clearing when King tried to "burn" him--prison slang, Brewer politely explained to the jury, "for trying to get me to look at his thing." Such sexual horseplay between Brewer and King was common. The two sometimes tweaked each other's breasts and teased each other about "getting it" from a black cellmate. The two men's racism, in short, seems intimately tied to their sexual fears.

It is telling, then, that Byrd's torture and killing included an element of sexual humiliation. Before chaining Byrd to the bumper, King and Brewer pulled down his pants. And, after the dragging was over and the trio was driving back to Jasper, Berry says King told him, "that's what they did to niggers when they messed with white women in the old days." But who was the white woman who felt sexually threatened by Byrd? It may have been King.

Of course, nothing King and Brewer experienced in prison justifies what they did. And, although their tattoos made them look tough, they were cowards. The man they killed was helpless and drunk. It is also true that many white inmates who join racist gangs in prison manage to leave them once they get out.

But the fact remains that the kind of racially motivated sexual torture and murder that King and Brewer committed is common enough in Texas prisons that, had they carried out a similar crime while still in jail, it would scarcely have been noticed. By committing it on the outside, King and Brewer have opened a window onto what happens on a frequent basis in Texas's vast prison system. And, as an estimated 300,000 men like King and Brewer are released from the Texas prison system over the next ten years, it is entirely possible--indeed, likely--that we will see more and more racially motivated, prison-style crimes outside prison walls. Just last month, police say, a white teenager who had been in several juvenile facilities in Indiana shot and killed a black teenager in order to gain status within a white-supremacist prison gang.

King, for his part, appears to have gotten the verdict he wanted. In a prison "kite," or note, that King sent to Brewer before their trials, King seems to have hoped to die a martyr to the cause of white supremacy. Indignant that Brewer testified that they were both at the murder scene, King has thrown Brewer out of the Confederate Knights of America, one of King's lawyers said. And, on the afternoon King was sentenced to death, the press asked him whether he had anything to say to Byrd's family. He replied, with a smirk, "They can suck my dick."

Last spring, while a hundred or so reporters and photographers waited for the jury to announce King's sentence, I drove to a state park on the edge of town to listen to the local radio station and breathe some fresh air. After a two-and-a-half-hour deliberation, the jury returned the death penalty. I looked up and a solitary pileated woodpecker swooped unhurriedly through the pines, its red topknot distinct and pointed. When the radio reporter interviewed Jasper citizens on the sidewalk, several of them said that, for the murderers of James Byrd, death was an easy way out. Life in prison, they reasoned, would have been worse.

MICHAEL BERRYHILL is a writer living in Houston. The reporting of this story was underwritten by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Inc.

Photograph of John William King by Adrees Latif.