Three men, Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William Bryan Jr., were convicted on Wednesday (24) in the United States for the murder of a black man, Ahmaud Arbery, in 2020, in the state of Georgia. The sentence is yet to be announced.
All three defendants were convicted of murder, aggravated assault, imprisonment and attempted crime. The jury also convicted Travis McMichael, who shot Arbery, of murder.
“It was a long fight. It was a tough fight. But God is good,” said Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, outside the Glenn County courthouse after the verdicts were announced. “I never thought this day would come, but God is good.”
The incident took place in February 2020. The three defendants, who are white, chased after Arbery, who was black, and shot him. The McMichaels, who are father and son, were indicted in May 2020 after Arbery’s family lawyers released footage of the defendants confronting Arbery, with Travis later shooting him. William Bryan, who joined the McMichaels in chasing Arbery and filming the incident, was denounced shortly thereafter.
The defendants claimed to believe that Arbery could be responsible for a series of robberies in the neighborhood. The defense cited Georgia’s arrest-by-citizens law, which stated that a citizen may make an arrest “if the crime is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge.” The law was repealed in May this year.
However, the prosecution alleged that the defendants’ actions were not covered by this law because the three did not inform police of any specific crimes Arbery committed the day he was shot.
“That is not enough to imprison a citizen. It’s not likely cause,” prosecutor Linda Dunikoski told the jury during closing arguments. “It was like, ‘I don’t know what the hell this guy was doing, but he was running down the street really fast.’
Dunikoski said later that the defendants “made the decision to attack Ahmaud Arbery on the sidewalk of their houses (only) because he was a black man running down the street.”
© 2021 The National Review. Published with permission. Original in english.
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