A white woman who chased down and fatally shot a Black man after a hit-and-run crash near Atlanta four years ago was sentenced to life in prison with the chance for parole.
She avoided a more severe term after the victim’s family claimed race was a motivating factor in the killing.
Hannah Renea Payne learned her fate on Dec. 15 after a Clayton County jury deliberated for less than two hours, finding her guilty in the 2019 killing of 62-year-old Kenneth Herring.
After the five-day trial, Payne was convicted on multiple counts, including felony murder, malice murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and three counts of possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. However, some charges were combined or dismissed to accommodate the life sentence plus 13 years handed down by Clayton County Superior Court Judge Jewel Scott.
Despite the overt racial undertones of the case, prosecutors opted not to pursue hate crime charges against Payne. This decision, noted by Herring’s relatives, was made despite Payne having a Black boyfriend at the time of the shooting, which they felt contradicted the criteria to prove a hate crime.
From the outset, the shooting case triggered speculation about whether racism played a role in motivating Payne to chase down and shoot Herring or if it was simply a case of vigilante justice gone tragically wrong.
“We never, ever brought race into this matter… that was too simple to say that it was Black and white,” District Attorney Tasha Mosley said, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We sat in our office for four years, having these discussions and trying to figure out why. Only Hannah Payne knows why she did it… We will never know because she never really told us the truth on the stand. That story kept changing.”
Herring’s family expressed dissatisfaction with the sentence as prosecutors did not pursue hate crime charges. They continue to live with the pain of his…
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