He hated black men. He wanted to kill one, and he did.
In a videotaped confession, James Harris Jackson, a white Army veteran from Baltimore, told investigators that he spent several days two years ago stalking black men in Manhattan before he spotted a 66-year-old man sifting through trash for recyclables.
And in
an undeniable testament of his hate, Mr. Jackson said he pulled a short sword from his coat and repeatedly stabbed the man, Timothy Caughman.
The killing, Mr. Jackson said, was “practice” for a larger attack he had planned for Times Square where he intended to murder young black men who were with white women because he loathed interracial dating.
Mr. Jackson, 30, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to
rare state charges of murder as terrorism and murder as a hate crime, accepting what is certain to be a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. His dramatic plea to all counts against him came four months after
the video of his interview with police was presented at a pretrial hearing in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.
Mr. Jackson, who walked into the courtroom on crutches, wearing black slack pants and a white button-up shirt, made no speech and expressed no remorse. He answered a series of questions from Justice Laura A. Ward in a matter-of-fact tone. The judge asked him if he had stabbed Mr. Caughman because he was black and hoped the attack would incite “a racial war.”
“Yes,” he said.
The murder of Mr. Caughman came at a time when hate crimes were rising throughout the country and in New York City. While New York has continued to be one of the safest big cities in the country, the number of reported hate crimes
increased by 5 percent last year.
Prosecutors in Manhattan say the number of cases in the borough has increased steadily since the 2016 election of
President Donald Trump, whose rhetoric is often divisive.
The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said Mr. Jackson’s conviction was the first of a white supremacist on terrorism charges in New York, and one of a few in the country. Mr. Vance had intended to try the case himself.
