A white Mississippi teenager pleaded guilty on Wednesday to fatally running over a man with a truck because he was black, and received a life prison sentence for a crime the presiding judge said left "a great stain" on the Southern state.
Deryl Dedmon, 19, received two concurrent life sentences for the racially motivated murder of 49-year-old James Craig Anderson, who died after being beaten and mowed down in a motel parking lot last year.
Dedmon's admission that he killed Anderson because of his race doubled the teen's penalty under the state's hate crime statute.
"I was young, I was dumb, I was ignorant," Dedmon said during his court hearing in Jackson. "I was full of hatred."
The sentencing came as the shooting death of a black teenager by a neighborhood watch captain in Florida has again put a national spotlight on the issue of minorities being targeted due to the color of their skin.
Anderson, a Nissan auto worker, was returning to his car before dawn on June 26 when he was confronted by a group of white teenagers in a motel parking lot.
The teens had been drinking at a birthday party and drove to Jackson specifically to harass African-Americans, said Hinds County Assistant District Attorney Scott Rogillio.
Anderson was physically attacked by the group before Dedmon deliberately ran over him with a Ford F-250 truck, Rogillio said. Anderson died at the scene.
Dedmon yelled "white power" during the attack, Rogillio said.
"Your prejudice has brought a great stain on the state of Mississippi," Circuit Court Judge Jeff Weill Sr. told Dedmon.
Mississippi has a long legacy of racial discrimination and was a focal point of Civil Rights activity during the 1960s and since. The racist Ku Klux Klan was prominent in the state for decades and remnants of the group remain.
