d he suspect his fate that was to follow. Angered, one of the passengers by the name of John King grabbed the wheel and drove to a dark deserted road outside of town. What happened thereafter undoubtedly has to be one of the most gruesome and horrifying crimes this country has seen since the day's slavery was legal. King and the final member of the trio, Lawrence Brewer, got out of the truck and began beating and kicking Byrd until he was nearly unconscious. Afterward, they chained him by his ankles to the back of the truck and dragged him so violently down the winding asphalt road, tearing off his head and right arm from his body. Police found Byrd's dentures torn from his mouth, lying a few hundred yards down the road from the rest of his body. Blood smeared a trail over a mile long.
             Research strongly suggests that hate crimes reported to the police have certain characteristics that distinguish them from other types of offenses. First, hate crimes tend to be excessively brutal; the hatred in such crimes is expressed when force is exercised beyond what is necessary to subdue victims or make them comply. Classifying the murder of James Byrd as "brutal" is definitely an understatement. A second characteristic of hate crimes is that they are often senseless or irrational crimes perpetrated at random on strangers. Finding a random black man walking down the road late at night and dragging him to death is not a common circumstance. Another characteristic of hate crimes is that they are usually perpetrated by multiple offenders; it is a group crime frequently carried out by young perpetrators operating together for the purpose of attacking the members of another group (Levin 16). The murder of James Byrd Jr. satisfies these characteristics, and unmistakably qualifies as a hate crime.
             Byrd's hometown of Jasper is a racially mixed town of 8,000 people located in a rural section of Texas; a Southern town with built in biases, ...