“They’ll be all right,” he told investigators. “It was just a little hot water on them.”

Mr. Tolbert said he spent 10 days in the hospital, undergoing skin grafts for burns on his back, arms and neck. Mr. Gooden, who was also severely burned, received a month of treatment for his injuries, during which he had to be put into an induced coma.

Franklin Engram, the assistant district attorney, said in an interview that Mr. Blackwell had told officers just before his arrest that the two men were “hollering” and “moaning” and were “stuck together like two hot dogs.”

Georgia is one of the few states that do not have a specific law governing hate crimes, so Mr. Blackwell was not charged with such a crime. And an F.B.I. spokesman, Kevin Rowson, said on Thursday that the agency was not pursuing a hate-crime investigation.

“We are aware of it, we have looked at it, but the bottom line is he is getting 40 years,” Mr. Rowson said. “At this point, we are not pursuing it.”

But officials at the district attorney’s office said on Thursday that they recognized the impact that the Blackwell case could have in setting a precedent in the handling of such crimes, where there was no provocation and the suspect’s motives for inflicting serious injury involved bias.

“Clearly, a case like this does get a tag as a special case on a high-profile list, where it is such a heinous crime,” Fani Willis, the Fulton County deputy district attorney, said in a telephone interview on Thursday.