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On “CNN Newsroom” Thursday afternoon, Drew Griffin of CNN’s special investigations unit used a racial slur while explaining phone call evidence from a recent case where the federal government charged three Mississippi men with a hate crime for running over a black man with a truck after severely beating him.

Griffin also compared the case to a shooting in Florida, where an unarmed black teenager was killed by a neighborhood watch leader.

“At the end of this, Deryl Dedmon is laughing with his friends and actually called on a cell phone and, pardon my language but there’s no other way to say this — ‘I just ran over that f—ing nigger,’ that’s what he said. And it was a clear-cut case of pure racial-intent murder that took place there, which is why it was so easy to apply the hate crime legislation in this case,” Griffin said. “There was no question about it, unlike the circumstances involving the case in Florida.”

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