A white supremacist has pleaded guilty to traveling to New York and killing a black man with a sword as part of a plan to start a race war in the U.S. James Jackson, 30, admitted to repeatedly stabbing 66-year-old Timothy Caughman in March 2017 in what prosecutors ruled an act of domestic terrorism.
Following his arrest the day after the fatal stabbing, Jackson told police he traveled from Baltimore, Maryland, to New York to carry out the attack in order to attract as much media attention as possible.
Jackson, an army veteran who served in Afghanistan, told detectives he considered the murder of Caughman a "declaration of global total war on the Negro race," adding he hoped the slaying would "inspire white men to kill black men, to scare black men, and to provoke a race war."
Jackson pleaded guilty to murder in the first degree in furtherance of an act of terrorism, murder in the second degree as a crime of terrorism, murder in the second degree as a hate crime, and criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said Jackson's guilty plea marks the first-ever prosecution of murder as a crime of terrorism in New York state.
"White nationalism will not be normalized in New York," Vance said in a statement. "If you come here to kill New Yorkers in the name of white nationalism, you will be investigated, prosecuted, and incapacitated like the terrorist that you are. You will spend your life in prison without possibility of parole because there is no place in our city or our society for terrorists—'domestic' or otherwise.
"This resolution won't bring back Timothy Caughman, a beloved New Yorker who was executed for being black on a midtown street corner," Vance said.
"It won't reverse the alarming rise of white nationalism in America. It is, however, the loudest message that a civil society can send to would-be terrorists, and I thank our prosecutors and the NYPD Detectives whose tireless work enabled us to secure this landmark conviction and send this very loud message today."
Speaking outside the courtroom, Vance said: "This was more than a murder case," reports the Associated Press. "This was a type of cruelty that needs to be treated with the most serious of our laws."
In a videotaped confession last October, obtained by the New York Post, Jackson described his shock that the stabbing on West 36th Street didn't spur him on to kill other black people as he originally intended.
"When I killed that guy, it wasn't, I didn't get like a rush of—I thought I was going to go into a berserker or madman Viking and start hacking people apart," he said. "It just didn't happen. I was kind of shocked."
Jackson faces life with without parole when he is sentenced on February 13.
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Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, domestic policy ... Read more
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