Walking down a lonely stretch of road at 2 am on a warm summer night in Jasper, Texas, James Byrd would not have seen any of it as a pickup truck pulled up beside him. Shawn Berry, driving the pickup with King and his friend Lawrence Brewer, offered him a ride. Byrd, a 49-year old African American returning home after a family party, accepted, and hopped on to the back of the truck. In thenext hour, he was dead meat.

King, whose racism was well known to friends, was angry that Berry offered a ride to a black man. He took the wheel at a nearby gas station. Soon after, he pulled into a clearing in the woods nearby. He and Brewer, both ex-cons, began beating up the black man. Berry says he fled. A short while later the pick-up pulled up again to pick him up as Berry was walking away. ``Are you going to leave him out there?'' he asked King as the truck picked up speed. Brewer answered, peering out of the back window, ``That #%$*& is bouncing all over the place.''

Ankles trussed up with a 24-feet tow chain tied to the pick up, James Byrd was dragged along for three miles on an asphalted Texas road. If he screamed no one heard him a state where you can drive hundreds of miles without meeting a soul. When they found his decapitated body, it was scorched all over. His elbows and heels were grated to the bone. Somewhere along the way, his head and right arm were severed from his torso. The trio haddumped the body at the gate of an old black cemetery. Then they went home and slept.It did not take much to crack the case. There was evidence strewn all over the place. A witness had seen three white men in a pick up truck giving a ride to a black man. Berry squealed under questioning. Last fortnight, as King's trial began in the small logging town 100 miles northeast of Houston, it shamed and repulsed America. How could the world's most advanced nation harbour such a barbaric racist with such a cruel bent of mind on the cusp of the third millennium? The answer might well have been true of the Orissa killing too: progress is no insurance against aberrant hate crimes.

Jasper burned with shame, but not hate. A quiet town of 8,000 people, it is a typically Texas. Pine, not sagebrush, is the primary local flora. Timber, not oil, fuels the local economy. Unlike most Texas towns, it is racially mixed. It has a black mayor and a white sheriff and no history of tension. The people are soft, quiet,non-confrontational. Perhaps if they had a chance, they would have liked to lynch King.

King wore a bullet proof vest to the courtroom each day. Full-sleeved, buttoned-up shirt covered his ugly, revolting tattoos. But his soul was naked, bared across the smug expression he wore each day as he listened to the arguments with his chin cupped. His lawyers had no defence worth the name. Even his father disowned him, saying, ``That ain't the boy I knew.'' King was unrepentant throughout the trial. In jail, he scratched his nickname Possum on the door, making a Nazi lightning bolt with the middle letters SS. ``Shawn Berry is a snitch-ass traitor,'' he inscribed elsewhere. In a letter to a local weekly, he said he is a ``victim of a judicial conspiracy as well as the District Attorney's personal animosity for an ex-convict... adorned with skin art mildly offensive to his and Jasperites' religious beliefs (he himself worshipped Odin, a Norse God who presides in Valhalla).'' In one note, he sent to his co-defendantBrewer (who will be tried separately), he wrote, ``Seriously though, bro, regardless of theoutcome of this, we have made history and shall die proudly remembered if need be. Much Aryan Love.'' Often he signed off, ``I, White and Proud, John W. King.''

Last evening, mostly white and not-so-proud, the 12-member jury deliberated for just two hours before convicting him. The verdict was announced by the only black juror who was selected as the foreman. The sentencing, which is done separately, could be a death penalty.

Byrd's murder is not an isolated racial incident in the US although nothing so barbaric has happened in recent years. Even as this trial recedes from public and journalistic attention, New York City is up in arms against four white policeman who earlier this month shot Amadou Diallo, a 22-year old immigrant from West Africa. Diallo was unarmed and posed no danger to the cops when he was killed in a hail of 41 bullets in front of his apartment for no apparent reason. And it's not blacks alonewho are victims of hate crimes. Elsewhere in the western state of Wyoming, weeks after Byrd was dragged to death in Texas, Matthew Shepard, a gay college student was kidnapped, severely beaten, and left to die tied to a fence in freezing temperatures. Two homophobes were charged with first degree murders. The incident has sparked off a wave of protests among the gay community across the country.

While barbarism knows no boundaries, there is one important difference between the hate crimes in the United States and the incidents in India. More often than not here, the perpetrators of crime are caught and booked swiftly and the due process of law takes over. John King will probably be put to death before Dara Singh is even caught -- if ever.