Live Updates: Jury Convicts Arbery Killers of Hate Crimes
The jurors decided that the three men previously convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery were motivated by racism.
BRUNSWICK, Ga. — A jury on Tuesday determined that the three white Georgia men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery violated a federal hate-crime statute by depriving Mr. Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, of his right to use a public street because of the color of his skin.
The jury also found the three men — Travis McMichael, 36, his father, Gregory McMichael, 66, and their neighbor William Bryan, 52 — guilty of attempted kidnapping and found the McMichaels guilty of one count each of brandishing or discharging a firearm during a violent crime.
The men now face up to life in prison for the federal crimes, on top of the life sentences they received earlier this year in state court after being convicted of Mr. Arbery’s murder, with only Mr. Bryan eligible for parole. The federal convictions ensure that the defendants will receive significant prison time even if their state convictions are overturned or their sentences reduced on appeal.
The victory will also be important, symbolically and emotionally, for Mr. Arbery’s family, as well as other observers who believed that the pursuit and fatal shooting of Mr. Arbery on a Sunday afternoon in February 2020 amounted to what the Rev. Al Sharpton called “a lynching in the 21st Century.”
During the federal trial, lawyers for the three defendants argued that the men had not been motivated by racial animus, but rather because Mr. Arbery seemed to them like a potential crime suspect. Prosecutors, however, presented copious evidence that showed that the men harbored coarse racist views about Black people.
After a graphic video of his fatal shooting went viral in 2020, Mr. Arbery joined a grim list of African American victims of recent violence that has triggered a broader conversation about the treatment of Black people at the hands of law enforcement and in everyday situations. This week’s verdict offered another example of the judicial system’s varied responses to these incidents, coming 10 months after a jury found Derek Chauvin, a white former Minneapolis police officer, guilty of murdering a Black man, George Floyd, and a few days after another white former police officer, Kimberly Potter, was sentenced to two years in prison for shooting Daunte Wright, a Black motorist, at a traffic stop.
Social justice advocates were generally pleased with the outcome of Mr. Chauvin’s trial, but some have expressed frustration that the sentence given to Ms. Potter, who was found guilty of manslaughter, seemed too lenient.
The Georgia hate-crimes trial followed a dramatic murder trial in state court concerning the Arbery killing. Key aspects of that trial were televised and the case attracted scores of demonstrators, including well-known Black activists like Mr. Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, to the small coastal city of Brunswick. A large group of activists chanted and cheered outside the Glynn County courthouse on the day before Thanksgiving, when a nearly all-white jury issued the guilty verdicts.
In the murder case, prosecutors treaded lightly on the topics of race and racism, focusing instead on the rash and dangerous decisions the men made when they decided to jump into a pair of trucks and chase the unarmed Mr. Arbery, who was on foot, through their quiet South Georgia neighborhood.
Even before the federal trial began, it was expected to be different because the men’s racist views — evidence of which was divulged or hinted at in pre-trial state hearings and court filings — would take center stage, with jurors forced to determine whether racism had been a motive in the actions of the defendants that day.
Earlier this month, the McMichaels appeared to be heading off the possibility of going through a federal trial, having reached plea deals with the U.S. Department of Justice in which they would have been sentenced to 30-year sentences to run concurrent with their state sentences. However, Mr. Arbery’s parents came to court and pleaded for U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood to reject the deals, in part because they would have allowed the men to spend the bulk of their sentences in the federal prison system, which is generally thought to be a less harsh environment than the Georgia state system. Judge Wood ended up rejecting the pleas.
When the evidence of the defendants’ racism was finally laid out in court, it proved to be both voluminous and harsh, including numerous uses of racist epithets and racial insults. Along with video of Mr. Arbery gasping for his final breaths on the pavement and testimony that the defendants did not render aid to him, the government’s case seemed to take an emotional toll on jurors, some of whom could be seen crying. Last week, one of the jurors asked court officials if counseling was available.
Even the defense lawyers acknowledged to the jury — made up of eight white members, three Black members and a Hispanic member — that their clients’ views were reprehensible. J. Pete Theodocion, a lawyer for Mr. Bryan, referred to racism as “among the lowest of human emotions.”
Text messages recovered from Mr. Bryan’s cellphone showed that he opposed his daughter’s relationship with a Black man, using a racist slur to describe the boyfriend in a text exchange four days before Mr. Arbery’s killing. A witness said Gregory McMichael made disparaging comments about a Black tenant who rented from him and about the civil rights leader Julian Bond.
Travis McMichael, the man who used his Remington shotgun to fatally shoot Mr. Arbery three times at close range, was revealed to have repeatedly used racist slurs, and expressed the desire to see violence and death visited upon Black people.
The government introduced no evidence to show that the men directed their racist language toward Mr. Arbery specifically. But prosecutors noted that some of the racist language had been used a few days or months before the killing. They also seemed to bet on the jury being revolted by how much evidence of racism there was, with the quantity of insults showing that these were more than accidental slips of the tongue.
“At the end of the day, the evidence in this case will prove that if Ahmaud Arbery had been white, he would have gone for a jog, checked out a house under construction and been home in time for Sunday supper,” Bobbi Bernstein, a Justice Department lawyer, told the jury. “Instead he went out for a jog, and he ended up running for his life. Instead he ended up bleeding to death, alone and scared, in the middle of the street.”
Gregory McMichael’s lawyer, A.J. Balbo, told the jury that Mr. McMichael had not been out to hunt down a Black person that day, but rather to go after Mr. Arbery specifically, after a police officer showed security camera images of Mr. Arbery entering a nearby house that was under construction.
Mr. Arbery had entered the house numerous times in the weeks before the shooting, including the moments before the chase began, though there is no evidence he stole or disturbed the property inside. Twelve days before the shooting, Travis McMichael had also seen Mr. Arbery outside the house and had called 911, claiming he saw Mr. Arbery reach toward his waistband, a gesture, Mr. McMichael said, that made it seem like he could have been reaching for a gun.
Travis McMichael’s lawyer, Amy Lee Copeland, noted that her client had been shocked, rather than “gleeful” after the shooting, which occurred after Mr. Arbery, pinned in by the two trucks, clashed with the younger Mr. McMichael, who had by that point stepped out of his truck with his shotgun in his hands.
Mr. Theodocion noted that his client, Mr. Bryan, did not know anything about Mr. Arbery’s history with the McMichaels, or his visits to the house, when he saw Mr. Arbery run by his house, with the McMichaels in full pursuit. Mr. Bryan joined the chase assuming that Mr. Arbery had done something wrong enough to warrant the pursuit, Mr. Balbo said.
The death of Mr. Arbery was met with revulsion from both conservative and liberal lawmakers in Georgia. It prompted state legislators to significantly weaken a citizen’s arrest law that one local prosecutor had cited soon after the shooting to argue that the three men should not be arrested. It also prompted them to pass a state hate-crime law.
This month, the legislature also passed a resolution declaring Wednesday, the two-year anniversary of the killing, “Ahmaud Arbery Day.”
BRUNSWICK, Ga. — The jurors in the federal hate crimes trial for the three white men who killed Ahmaud Arbery began discussing the case on Monday afternoon, after more than five hours of closing statements from federal prosecutors and defense lawyers.
The jurors, drawn from a 43-county area in southern Georgia, faced the task of determining not whether the men pursued and murdered Mr. Arbery but whether they did so because of the color of his skin, and otherwise violated his constitutional rights.
The three defendants — Gregory McMichael, 66; his son, Travis McMichael, 36; and their neighbor William Bryan, 52 — had already been found guilty of murder in state court and sentenced to life in prison, with only Mr. Bryan given the possibility of parole. They face additional sentences of up to life in prison in the federal case.
The jury convicted the men of five separate federal charges. The first two counts are hate crime allegations: They accused the three men of using force and threats of force to intimidate and interfere with Mr. Arbery’s right to use a public street because of his race.
The third count in the indictment charged the three men with attempted kidnapping, for cutting off Mr. Arbery’s route with their trucks and trying to confine him. The fourth and fifth counts each applied to only one defendant and concerned firearms used in the course of federal crimes: Travis McMichael was charged with discharging a shotgun, and Gregory McMichael with brandishing a .357 revolver.
Judge Lisa Godbey Wood read each of the charges aloud on Monday afternoon before sending the jurors out of the courtroom to start their work. She allowed them to deliberate until nearly 6 p.m. and then asked them to reconvene on Tuesday morning, when they rendered a verdict.
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Continue reading the main storyBRUNSWICK, Ga. — A federal prosecutor in the hate crimes trial for the three white men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery told the jury in closing arguments on Monday that the defendants targeted Mr. Arbery because of his race and did not help him after he was shot because they considered him to be “subhuman.”
Defense lawyers argued that their clients chased Mr. Arbery because they thought he might have committed a crime.
And despite copious evidence that the men harbored bigoted beliefs, defense lawyers said there was not enough evidence to prove that racism was the reason the men pursued Mr. Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, through their South Georgia neighborhood on a Sunday afternoon in February 2020.
On Monday afternoon, a jury began deliberating on whether the five-minute pursuit, which ended in the fatal shooting of Mr. Arbery, amounted to a crime of interfering with his right to use public streets because of his “race and color,” as an indictment put it.
The three defendants — Gregory McMichael, 66; his son, Travis McMichael, 36; and their neighbor William Bryan, 52 — have already been found guilty of murder in state court and sentenced to life in prison, with only Mr. Bryan given the possibility of parole. They could face additional sentences of up to life in prison in the federal case, which includes a charge of attempted kidnapping and weapons charges for the McMichaels.
The weeklong federal trial revealed the dehumanizing ways that the men viewed African Americans. The trial will now turn on whether the jury believes that the prosecution created a sufficient link between the defendants’ previous racist statements and the decisions they made on the day of the killing.
The federal prosecutor, Christopher J. Perras of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, reminded jurors in his closing statement that it was not necessary for the government to show that the men had “hate in their hearts” on the day of the killing. Rather, he said, the government had to show only that “race was one of the reasons it happened.”
Mr. Perras said the men’s actions amounted not to vigilance, but to vigilantism. “When Greg McMichael saw Ahmaud Arbery jogging by his house, and Greg suspected that Ahmaud was up to no good, he didn’t call police. He grabbed his son, and his gun, and chased after him.”
When that chase passed Mr. Bryan’s house, he said, Mr. Bryan gave chase as well, assuming that Mr. Arbery must have been up to no good because he was being pursued by two white men, rather than suspecting the white men might be in the wrong.
In her closing statement, Amy Lee Copeland, the lawyer for Travis McMichael, acknowledged that the evidence presented in court of his racism was disturbing. But she said that the government had not done enough to show that the pursuit and the killing were motivated by race. She said Mr. McMichael believed that Mr. Arbery was going to harm him, and that Mr. McMichael was defending himself when he fired the shots.
J. Pete Theodocion, a lawyer for Mr. Bryan, said that his client would have helped to pursue any person who was being chased down his street, regardless of race. “His instincts told him people do not get chased like that, people do not get chased like that unless they’ve done something wrong,” he said.
A.J. Balbo, a lawyer for Greg McMichael, noted that the police had previously shown Mr. McMichael surveillance videos of Mr. Arbery inside a house under construction near the McMichaels’ home. Mr. McMichael recognized Mr. Arbery on the afternoon of Feb. 23, 2020, when Mr. Arbery ran past him, the lawyer said, and he pursued him because he suspected that Mr. Arbery had committed a crime.
More than 1,000 people spread across 43 counties received jury summonses for the federal hate crimes trial of the three men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. Over more than five days, that potential pool was whittled down to 12 members and four alternates.
Of the dozen people selected for the jury, eight are white, three are Black and one is Hispanic. They include a cook, a social worker, a stay-at-home father, a former cosmetology worker and an air-traffic controller.
The racial makeup of the jury is of particular interest because the federal trial has dealt directly with matters of race. The three white defendants, Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William Bryan, are accused of pursuing Mr. Arbery, then confronting and killing him, specifically because he was Black.
In the state trial of the three men last year, in which they were convicted of murder, the judge approved a nearly all-white jury, even as he declared that there was an appearance of “intentional discrimination” at play as defense attorneys exercised their right to exclude some of the potential jurors.
But the judge, Timothy R. Walmsley of Glynn County Superior Court, also said that defense lawyers had presented legitimate reasons unrelated to race to justify unseating eight potential Black jurors. And that, he said, was enough for him to reject the prosecution’s effort to reseat them.
The jury that convicted Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer, of murder in the killing of George Floyd, a Black man whose death in 2020 ignited racial justice protests across America, included three Black men, one Black woman and two women who identified as multiracial.
Another jury is currently considering federal civil rights charges against three other former police officers for the death of Mr. Floyd. That jury is overwhelmingly white.
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Continue reading the main storyBRUNSWICK, Ga. — In the two years since Ahmaud Arbery’s killing, much of the community has been focused on issues of racial inequality, wrestling with widespread frustrations among Black residents that had gone largely unaddressed.
There have been some concrete signs of change. Glynn County, which includes Brunswick, appointed its first Black police chief, Jacques S. Battiste. The former district attorney, Jackie Johnson, who was widely criticized for her handling of Mr. Arbery’s killing, was voted out of office and then indicted in relation to the case. She is accused of “showing favor and affection” to one of the men charged with the murder of Ahmaud Arbery and for directing police officers not to arrest another suspect.
City leaders in Brunswick, a city of 16,000 between Savannah and Jacksonville on Georgia’s southern coast, voted to remove a marble monument of a Confederate soldier that had stood in a public square since 1902. Community events focused on race now take place regularly.
“Race and racism is part of an active conversation here now,” said Bobby Henderson, the co-founder of A Better Glynn, a grass-roots group formed last year in response to Mr. Arbery’s killing, “whereas before it was an uncomfortable tension.”
Mr. Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was chased through a Brunswick suburb and then fatally shot at close range on Feb. 23, 2020. Three white men, Travis and Gregory McMichael and William Bryan, were found guilty of his murder late last year and now face federal hate-crime charges.
The case, which drew nationwide protests after a graphic video of the killing was released, has drawn attention to racial division in a community that has long cherished its image as a “model Southern city.”
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