Ahmaud Arbery Trial Verdicts: Guilty
Ahmaud Arbery protest, screen grab from ABC News.
The Ahmaud Arbery trial verdicts are in: Travis and Gregory McMichael found guilty,and Roddie Bryan found guilty of all but the malicious murder charge.
Jurors found Travis McMichael guilty of murder Wednesday for chasing and fatally shooting Ahmaud, a 25-year-old Black man, as he jogged last year through a neighborhood in Glynn County, Georgia.
McMichael now faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Jurors convicted him of one count of malice murder and four counts of felony murder
Gregory McMichael, one of three men, accused of killing 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, has been found guilty of felony murder.
McMichael now faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
William “Roddie” Bryan Jr., one of three men, accused of killing 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, has been found guilty of felony murder.
Bryan now faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Jurors convicted him of felony murder but acquitted him of the malice murder charge.
All three men still face federal hate crime charges.
I stand by what I wrote about this case during the preliminary hearings:
I don’t use this word lightly–pretty sure I’ve never had to use it in writing before–but let’s call this by the name that it is:
This was a lynching.
You can watch the testimony quoted above here at the 3:19:00 mark, how this was not only not self- defense by the McMichaels, but was self-defense by Arbery after being hunted down.
Give the McMichaels, Bryant, and whoever else is involved the fair trial they are entitled to. But may they get justice, swiftly, for what they did to Ahmaud Arbery: denying him the basic rights of not being hunted down, struck by a truck, shot in the chest, and then killed when he had the gall to try and defend himself. They killed him because, in the words of Bryant, they “felt Arbery was trying to escape.” They murdered a black man for not doing what they told him to do, because they assumed he had done something wrong, then stood over his body uttering slurs while Arbery left this life in a pool of his own blood, all because of the McMichaels’ feelings, assumptions, and prejudices.
That’s a lynching. No other word for it.
There is a lot of wicked in the authorities in Brunswick who tried to sweep all this under the rug, excuse it, and justify it. Every single one of them should be brought up on charges as well. The McMichaels and Bryant will stand trial first, but it shouldn’t end there.
To hell with all of them. But since that isn’t in our purview to designate as punishment, because unlike the McMichaels we realize we are not God, we are left to trust the justice system to make this right.
Not sure there is such a thing in this case.
God have mercy on us all for that.
A breakdown of the charges.
I wonder how much difference there will be between the three when it comes to sentencing.Report
They should go to prison for a long, long time. It is hard to feel anything but sadness over a senseless murderReport
I agree, but you can only put a guy in prison for life once, no matter whether he was found guilty of three counts of felony murder, four of them, or four of them *PLUS* malice murder.Report
None of the death penalty enhancements appear to apply:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Georgia_(U.S._state)#Capital_crimes
To be clear, i oppose capital punishment, even when (as in this case), there’s no doubt of guilt.Report
The line I was thinking of was from the Great Brain books. “You can only hang a man once, no matter how many people he’s killed” and I remember thinking “you can hang a guy plenty of times!”Report
It would have been hard to hang Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti again.Report
IANAL, and it shows: I do not regret the convictions or the sentences, and yet I also don’t comprehend how one can face three counts of felony murder when only one person got dead.Report
IANAL (wow, that looks dirty) too, but perhaps it’s once for each felony they committed? Bryan was not guilty of one of the aggravated assaults and likewise had one fewer felony murder conviction.Report
That’s about right, but a criminal lawyer would be able to get deeper into the weeds. Em?Report
It looks even dirtier with “too” instead of “either.”Report
IANAL. Yes, I wondered at that too.Report
Sometimes the arc of the universe is long but does bend towards justice.Report
Ooooh, what’s really interesting is that the former prosecutor has now been charged with misconduct!
Let’s see more of this.Report
Absolutely.Report
Jail records show she was released on her own recognizance, meaning she did not have to pay a cash bond.
More unwarranted leniency.Report
I was surprised not to hear more about this, especially as rare as it is.
I looked at the indictment, it seems really weak to me. It’s ~3 paragraphs long, basically says the woman prosecutor violated her oath of office by not prosecuting this case, and some circumstantial details of who to and when she recused the case. Also that she told the police not to arrest the suspects, which if she doesn’t intend to prosecute them seems legit to me. I was hoping some of the lawyers would say more about it.
As a generality, I think prosecutors should get way more heat than they do but my inclination is to think this is way overdone. Not that it’s the only variable in the equation, but it’s at least a little disappointing to me that only case like this I’ve ever heard of is about a prosecutor declining to prosecute. For me, there’s way more misconduct in prosecutors over-prosecuting.Report
This is good to hear. I’m getting hazy on the details but if I recall there was lots of “cover up” initially involving the DA’s office and police I believe? Only after video surfaced was there any action taken. Hopefully those folks who tried to cover it up are next in line for accountability.Report
We’re so used to the injustice of prosecutors overcharging people who aren’t *THAT* guilty and railroading people who are that we’ve gotten out of the habit of being outraged at prosecutors just overlooking crimes and not charging for them.
Prosecutors who fail in this are also being unjust.Report
If the DAs overlooked this because the culprit had been an investigator for their office, that’s corruptionReport
Good.Report
The conviction is satisfying. I’m hoping it doesn’t find a successful appeal.Report
Its instructive to think of how, without the murderers videoing themselves, this murder would be invisible, just listed as “robbery suspect shot dead” or something.
That the entire machinery of the justice system- the cops, the prosecutor- wanted to shield the murderers should give anyone pause who blithely dismisses claims of structural racism.Report
Thankfully, the three men were so certain of their righteousness that they filmed the whole thing and made it available to authorities. The next people to do a lynching probably won’t make that mistake.Report
The word I’m thinking of is “impunity”.
In their world, a white man can become judge, jury, and executioner of a black man and walk away with impunity.
Where would these men get such an idea?
Maybe they got it from the fact that the entire machinery of the justice system agreed with them.Report
The American judicial system demonstrates its racism by…white men being found guilty for killing a black man…wait, I can do this…because – Oh, I got it! They thought they could! That’s it!Report
Missing the point, of course, most likely deliberately. Not because they thought they could — but because they had good reason to think they could.Report
And almost did. It’s certainly encouraging that once it got into a courtroom, with a competent, unconflicted prosecutor, a jury — cynically selected for cynical reasons — did the right thing against the defense’s expectations. But it took too many lucky breaks to make that possible. Sort of like George Floyd’s case.Report
I wonder what we would find if we dived deep into all the other cases of black men who were killed in “robberies gone wrong”.
Or took a good long look at all the other cases that these cops and prosecutor never bothered to bring to trial.Report
The American judicial system found two white men guilty of killing a black man…but they’re racist, so…there must be dead black men that they’re not investigating?Report
Pretty much.Report
Yes, we know that the prosecutor deliberately tried to thwart justice, so its reasonable to assume she did this other times as well.Report
Three self-defense cases this week. The white-on-white was found not guilty, the black-against-cops was found not guilty, and the white-on-black was found guilty. The last two were in the South. It’s ok if you say “things are better than I thought they were”. If you can’t say that now, and you still build your arguments on anecdotes (just other anecdotes), then you’ll probably never say it.
Also, it’s Thanksgiving.Report
Yes, we shouldn’t build our arguments on anecdotes and headline making cases, but instead we should look at patterns which never make the media.
Like a prosecutor who would still be on the job, were it not for a video that happened to go viral. I wonder how many guilty people she let walk, or how many innocent people she prosecuted.Report
That’s an anecdote.
Today is Thanksgiving. We should all be grateful that the country is a little more like I thought it was a week ago than like you did.Report
I would suggest considering that in matters like this the issue of government (lack of) accountability is a much bigger player than race. It was only 2 weeks ago that the commentary was full of hand wringing over the fact that 11 of the 12 jurors were white.Report
I would also like to stress that any one of those eleven white jurors could have prevented a conviction. In a trial held in Georgia, the defense couldn’t get one juror out of eleven willing to vote to acquit on the grounds that the defendants are white and the victim was black.
Granted, this is not the highest bar. But it does suggest that even Georgia is less racist than many would have us believe that the country as a whole is. Certainly those who said that the Rittenhouse acquittal was a product of white supremacy look even more ridiculous now than they did a week ago.Report
The point is ridiculous, so I was ridiculing it.Report