Already sentenced to life prison in early January, the three murderers of the young black jogger were judged for a week before a Federal Court of Georgia, this time on the racist character of their actions.
Already sentenced to murder in this case, three white Americans have just been convicted, Tuesday, February 22, of “racist crime” by a federal jury. Travis McMichael, 36, his father Gregory McMichael, 66, and their neighbor William Bryan, 52, had already been convicted of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a young black jogger they had chased and killed.
This first trial, after which they were sentenced to the prison for life by the Justice of the State of Georgia, had only cropped the racist dimension of the drama, contrary to this second federal trial, which put this question at the center of the debates.
Shortly after the announcement of the verdict, Ahmaud Arbery’s family came out of the court by standing with the hands raised in the air, as a sign of victory. “We got justice for Ahmaud,” said his father, Marcus Arbery. “It has been a long and trying battle,” added Ahmaud Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones. “We got a victory today, but there are so many families for whom it is not the case,” she recalled.
Violent racist insults
During the trial, the Prosecution has listed the particularly violent racist insults uttered by the three men in the past, with the aim of reporting on the State of mind of the accused when they started the pursuit of Ahmaud Arbery. According to the Prosecure, the son McMichael had for example qualified the African Americans of “criminals”, “monkeys”, “savages and sub-men”.
The proceedings of the jury, composed of eight white people, three black and Hispanic, lasted less than a day. Ahmaud Arbery “was lynched for making a jog while being black,” said Tuesday the family lawyer, Ben Crump, who had also defended the relatives of George Floyd, an African-American death asphyxied. of his interpellation by white policemen.
“I think it’s the first federal condemnation of a crime motivated by hatred in the state of Georgia,” he added. The “crime motivated by hatred” traditionally refers to the United States an act directed against a targeted person because of certain characteristics of his identity.
Two years almost day for day, on February 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was jogging in Brunswick, a coastal locality of Georgia, when it was fought by the three men, armed and aboard two pickups. After a few minutes of race-pursuit, Travis McMichael had shot down.
For more than two months, the police did not interfere. It took the diffusion of a video of the drama, relayed massively on the internet, for the investigation to begin. Ahmaud Arbery had then become an emblem of the Black Lives Matter movement (“the black lives”) during the major anti-cell events of 2020.
During their first trial, the three men had assured that you took the young african american for an active burglar in the neighborhood and wanted to stop it. At the approach of the federal trial, the father and the son McMichael had a pleadable agreement with the prosecutors, admitting for the first time having fed racist prejudices.
The family had then fiercely opposed to this agreement, “said Mother Wanda Cooper-Jones on Tuesday, denouncing the decision of the prosecutors. This agreement, which would have allowed the two men to be transferred to a federal prison, had finally been invalidated by a judge.