This jogger had been killed by bullets on February 23, 2020 by three white men in Brunswick, in the state of Georgia. The trial must really start this Friday.
Le Monde with AFP
The jury selected to judge three white men accused of the murder of the Black Jogger Ahmaud Arbery was strongly challenged Thursday, November 4 in the United States, African-Americans all, with one exception, been removed from the panel of 12 holders and Four substitutes. “It’s scandalous,” said Ben Crump’s lawyer, specializing in violence files against African Americans, denouncing in a statement “a cynical effort to help killers escape justice”.
“It’s very difficult for the family who just wants to have a fair trial without racial bias, but it’s part of our system,” the lawyer Lee Merritt said in the local media who defends the mother of Ahmaud Arbery. This one, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said “shocked”.
On February 23, 2020, his son jogged in Brunswick, in the state of Georgia, when he had been chased by Gregory McMichael, 65, his / her son Travis, 35 years old and one of their neighbor, William Bryan, 52 years. After an altercation, the young McMichael had opened fire and killed the jogger. The three men then had assured him for a burglar and invoked a law of that southern state authorizing simple citizens to proceed with arrests.
Late charge
For nearly three months, the services of the local attorney, for whom Gregory McMichael, a retired police officer, had long worked, had no arrest. It had taken the spread of the drama video, early May 2020, so that the three men be arrested and charged for “murder”.
On October 18, a thousand potential jurors had been summoned by the Brunswick court that must judge this emblematic case of the Movement Black Lives Matter (the black lives count). After two and a half weeks of interrogations, 64 candidates, including a dozen African Americans, had been pre-selected, reflecting the racial composition of the county, where a quarter of the population is black.
Wednesday, the lawyers of the accused, however, claimed all the black people, except one. In the United States, it is forbidden to discard a jury solely on the basis of its belonging to an ethnic group and the Prosecutor asked the judge to invalidate the maneuver. The magistrate, Timothy Walmsley, refused. “It looks like there has been intentional discrimination,” he recognized. But the defense lawyers “were able to explain to the Court why, regardless of the racial issue, they had challenged these jurors”.
Another jury made controversy
The trial must enter the quick Friday with the presentation of the arguments of the parties and last several weeks. Ironically calendar, another quasi monochrome jury (11 white people and a person of color) was shaken by a controversy Thursday in Kenosha, in the north of the country.
The city had inflamed in August 2020 because white policemen had seriously injured a black young man, Jacob Blake, pulling him in his back. On the sidelines of the demonstrations, a young white man Kyle Rittenhouse had opened fire on protesters, two dead and a wounded.
On the fourth day of his trial, the judge excluded a member of the jury, a white retiree who had ironed on burrowing at the origin of the case. “Why did the police shoot seven times in Jacob Blake’s back?” Had he launched the day before, in the form of a “joke”, to an officer of the court that was running him. “Because she was running out of bullets …”