On April 16, Eric Dewayne Boyd was convicted in federal court as an accessory after the fact (PDF) to carjacking, for helping Lemaricus Davidson hide out from the police, following the January 7, 2007 carjacking-kidnapping-gang-rape-torture-murder of the white couple, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, in Knoxville, Tennessee. Boyd faces up to 22 years in prison, at his August 12 sentencing hearing. (Davidson and three co-defendants are to be tried separately, beginning possibly in December, for theft, kidnapping, rape and murder. Boyd and the four co-defendants are all black.)

Davidson’s white former girlfriend, Daphne Sutton, testified that:

· Davidson had told her that his half-brother and co-defendant, Letalvis Cobbins, had forced Channon Christian to shoot her boyfriend, Christopher Newsom, to death. (Sutton’s hearsay claim was refuted by other witnesses.); and

On January 9, 2007, she had ”hindered the investigation” by lying to police investigators hunting for Davidson, in denying that she had seen him since January 7, and that she had helped Davidson elude capture only hours earlier, by dropping him off near Boyd’s mother’s Knoxville house.

Last June, Knox County District Attorney General Randy Nichols asserted, based on the then-unnamed Sutton, that the atrocity could not have been racially motivated.

"We know from our investigation that the people charged in this case were friends with white people, socialized with white people, dated white people. So not only is there no evidence of any racial animus, there's evidence to the contrary."

Note that when white men are charged with racial attacks against blacks, having a black girlfriend is always ruled out of bounds as exoneration against charges of ”racism.”

Boyd’s attorney, Phil Lomonaco, has insisted that Sutton was not prosecuted because she was white and had an uncle in the Knoxville PD, Officer Dennis R. Bible, and that since Sutton was not prosecuted, neither should Boyd have been. Actually, the logical conclusion is not that Boyd should have been let off, but that Sutton should also be prosecuted.