Nearly two decades after orchestrating one of the most infamous hate crimes of the 20th Century, John William King was executed in Texas Wednesday night.

An avowed racist, King, 44, is known for the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old black man. King led a group that chained Byrd to the back of a pickup truck and dragged his body through the woods for nearly three miles until he died. King and the others left Byrd’s mangled corpse on the side of a road outside Jasper, Texas.

King was pronounced dead by lethal injection at 7:03 p.m. He declined to have any final words but wrote out a one-sentence statement that read: “Capital punishment: Them without the capital get the punishment.”

One of Byrd’s sisters, Louvon Byrd Harris, told NBC she is glad King is finally being punished but said his pain doesn’t come close to what her brother experienced when he was murdered.

“I think it will be a message to the world that when you do something horrible like that, that you have to pay the high penalty,” said Harris. “All they are going to do is go to sleep. But half the things they did to James, all the suffering he had to go through, they still get an easy way out to me.”

Two other men were arrested as part of the murder. Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed in 2011 and Shawn Allen Berry remains behind bars, sentenced to life in prison.

Byrd’s death spurred on federal hate crime legislation such as the Matthew Shepard Act, the formal name of which is the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.