24th November, 2021
All three white men charged in the death of African American Ahmaud Arbery were convicted of murder Wednesday.
The jury reached its decision after more than 10 hours of deliberations following the trial.
Prosecutors had argued that the defendants provoked a confrontation with Arbery and defense attorneys countered their clients were acting in self-defense.
The three white men were convicted for chasing and shooting Arbery as he ran in their neighbourhood, with a Georgia jury rejecting a self-defense claim in a trial that once again probed America’s divisive issues of race and guns.
The verdict was delivered by the jury, consisting of one Black man and 11 white men and women, after about a two-week trial in the coastal city of Brunswick in a case that hinged on whether the defendants had a right to confront the unarmed 25-year-old avid jogger last year on a hunch he was fleeing a crime.
Gregory McMichael, 65, his son Travis McMichael, 35, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, 52, were charged with murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal intent to commit a felony.
They face a minimum sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole.
Jurors reached their verdict on the second day of deliberations.
There was never any dispute that the younger McMichael fired his pump-action shotgun three times at Arbery at close range on Feb. 23, 2020, in the suburban community of Satilla Shores.
It was captured on a graphic cellphone video made by Bryan, stoking outrage when it emerged more than two months later and the public learned that none of the three men had been arrested.
Lawyers for the McMichaels argued that the killing was justified after Arbery ran past the McMichaels’ driveway in a neighborhood that had experienced a spate of property thefts. Both McMichaels grabbed their guns and jumped in their pickup truck in pursuit, with Bryan, unarmed, joining moments later.
Prosecutors said the defendants had “assumed the worst” about a Black man out on a Sunday afternoon jog. He was chased by the defendants for about five minutes around the looping streets.
Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, looked up appearing to mouth silent prayer in the courtroom as the judge prepared to read out the verdict. As the first guilty verdict was read aloud, she sobbed aloud: “Oh!”
Her head sunk into her chest as she wept, with civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton gripping her hand. Arbery’s father Marcus Arbery leapt up and cheered.
Sheriff’s deputies came over and told him he had to leave.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Marcus Arbery said, and left.
The verdict follows a jury’s Nov. 19 acquittal in another closely watched trial of an 18-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse who fatally shot two men during racial justice protests in Wisconsin.
Both cases highlighted the broader issue of U.S. gun violence that President Joe Biden has called a national embarrassment. In both, defendants claimed self-defense.
The three men face a federal trial next year on hate-crime charges, accused in an indictment of violating Arbery’s civil rights by embarking on the fatal chase because of his “race and color.”
Some Black Americans used a despairing phrase to describe a case seen as another example of Black people falling under suspicion while innocently doing an everyday activity: “running while Black.”
Arbery’s name was added to those invoked in nationwide anti-racism protests in 2020 that erupted after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, both of whom were Black.