The young man was chased by three men and killed by bullets on February 23, 2020, in the state of Georgia, while it was jogging.
Le Monde
Three white men were sentenced, Friday, January 7, to the prison for life for pursuing and shot down a young black jogger, Ahmaud Arbery, that they said they suspected of being a burglar, in February 2020 in Georgia , in the southern United States.
Travis McMichael, 35 years old and author of the mortal shots, and his father, Gregory McMichael, 66, were sentenced to perpetuity without possibility of early release. Their neighbor William Bryan, 52, who participated in the pursuit by filming it, was sentenced to life prison with the possibility of applying for early release after thirty years of imprisonment.
Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was released “to jog and he ended up running to save his life,” said Judge Timothy Walmsley by pronouncing the sentence.
The three men had been convicted of murder on November 24, 2021, at the end of debates marked by the issue of racism and the right to self-defense.
A state deeply marked by the Racism
In front of the judge, Ahmaud Arbery’s family had called for a “maximum punishment” on Friday morning. They “took my son for target because they did not want him in their neighborhood,” assured Ahmaud Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones. The counsel for the three men pleaded one last time an unintentional act.
On February 23, 2020, the young man was jogging in Brunswick, a coastal town of Southeast of Georgia, when he had been fought by the three men aboard their cars. After an altercation, Travis McMichael had opened fire and killed the jogger trying to seize his rifle. He had supported having acted in a state of self-defense.
The accused had assured that he took Ahmaud Arbery for a burglar, after having seen it a few days before entering a house under construction. They had also invoked an old law that allows simple citizens to stop a suspect in Georgia.
In this state still profoundly marked by racism and segregation, the three men had benefited from the clemency of the local prosecutor, for whom Gregory McMichael had long worked, who had left them at liberty. It had taken the distribution in May of the video filming the death of the young man for the investigation to be entrusted to the police police and that the three men are arrested.
The name of Ahmaud Arbery had been chanted in the great anti-racist manifestations that had held throughout the country in the summer of 2020, after George Floyd’s death, an African-American killed by a white policeman.