The New York Times
ATLANTA — Deryl Dedmon, a white teenager who drove a pickup truck over a black man in the parking lot of a Jackson, Miss., motel, pleaded guilty to murder on Wednesday and was sent to prison for life.
He is expected to answer federal charges in the case on Thursday.
"This craven act isn’t who we are,” said Judge Jeff Weill of Hinds County as he sentenced Mr. Dedmon, 19, to two concurrent life terms.
Under the state’s guidelines for capital murder, Mr. Dedmon could have faced the death penalty, but the victim’s family urged state and federal prosecutors to spare his life, saying they opposed it on religious grounds.
"I do not ask y’all to forget, but I do ask y’all to forgive," Mr. Dedmon said to the family of James C. Anderson, 47, who was killed last June, according to pool reporters in the courtroom.
"I wish I could take it all back," said Mr. Dedmon, who admitted to heading into Jackson at other times to harass and assault blacks.
"I was young and dumb, ignorant and full of hatred,” he said. “I chose to go down the wrong path."
The killing, which was caught by a surveillance camera and widely distributed, once again laid bare racial problems in Mississippi.
Marches were held and some Jackson residents and civil rights leaders complained that the local police and prosecutors did not act quickly enough to arrest the seven white teenagers from a neighboring county who drove to Jackson in two vehicles on a hot June night with the intention of finding an African-American to harass.
What will happen to those other teenagers is likely to be revealed on Thursday when the results of a Justice Department hate crime investigation are aired in court, according to two people with detailed knowledge of the case.
As he has promised for months, Robert S. Smith, the Hinds County district attorney, said other charges in the case would be coming.
Federal officials and a grand jury have investigated the role various teenagers played, including John A. Rice, 19, who investigators said punched Mr. Anderson.
He has been charged with simple assault, pleaded not guilty and is free on bond.
The teenagers, who had spent the night at a birthday party bonfire, originally told the police they had driven about 16 miles from the largely white suburb of Brandon to buy beer in Jackson.
In later interviews, according to prosecutors at the hearing Wednesday, some of the teenagers said they were in fact looking for a black person to harass who was either drunk or homeless and thus less likely to report the crime.
They found Mr. Anderson standing near his car in a parking lot of a motel off the freeway just before 5 a.m. Some of the teenagers punched Mr. Anderson. Then, as he stumbled along the side of the road, Mr. Dedmon accelerated his truck and ran over him.
The teenagers yelled “white power” during the assault, prosecutors said Thursday, and some of the teenagers told investigators that Mr. Dedmon used a racial slur when he was bragging about the matter in a cellphone conversation minutes later.
Mr. Anderson’s family and his life partner, James Bradfield, described him as a generous family man who was helping to raise a young relative of Mr. Bradfield’s, sang in the First Hyde Park Missionary Baptist Church choir and worked at a nearby Nissan plant.
They said they had not been able to piece together why he was at the motel that morning.
The family has filed a wrongful death suit in the case against all seven teenagers who the police say were involved, including two girls.
Morris Dees, a founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is working with the family and their lawyer, Winston J. Thompson III. He said the family would continue to push for a civil trial so that more about the case could be revealed.
“You continue to see this around the country, the systematic targeting of black people. That’s what happened here and that’s what happened in Florida,” he said, referring to the case in Sanford, Fla., in which an unarmed black teenager was shot and killed almost four weeks ago by a white Hispanic crime watch volunteer. No charges have been filed in that case.