A white supremacist has been executed 21 years after he dragged a black man behind a truck for nearly three miles.
John William King and two other men had targeted hitch-hiker James Byrd Jr in the early hours of 7 June 1998 because of his skin colour, prosecutors had said.
Mr Byrd, 49, had been chained to the back of the truck and dragged three miles along a road near Jasper, Texas.
He is thought to have been alive for around two-thirds of that distance before his body was torn apart.
His remains were dumped in front of an African-American church.
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King, who had racist tattoos on his body including one of a black man being hung from a tree, is the fourth person executed in the US this year and the third in Texas.
He refused to look at witnesses before his death and also declined to make a statement to them. But in a statement released after his execution, he said: "Capital punishment: them without the capital get the punishment."
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Twelve minutes after he was injected, he died.
Afterwards, Mr Byrd's sister Clara Taylor, who watched the execution, said it had been a "just punishment", adding: "I felt nothing – no sense of relief, no sense of happy this is over with".
Louvon Byrd Harris, another of Mr Byrd's sisters, said earlier this month that the execution would send a "message to the world that when you do something horrRead More – Source
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