His name had been chanted in the major anti-racist protests that rocked the country in the summer of 2020.
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They were convicted of murder on November 24, after debates marked by the issue of racism and the right to self-defense. Three white Americans were sentenced, Friday, January 7, to life imprisonment for having pursued and then killed a young black jogger, Ahmaud Arbery, in February 2020 in Georgia, in the southern United States.
Travis McMichael, 35 and perpetrator of the fatal shots, and his father Gregory McMichael, 66, were given life sentences without the possibility of early release. Their neighbor William Bryan, 52, who participated in the prosecution by filming it, was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of requesting early release after 30 years in prison.
Ahmaud Arbery is out “to jog and he ended up running for his life”, Judge Timothy Walmsley said as he passed sentence in Brunswick, a coastal town in the southeastern part of the state.
In front of the judge, the family of Ahmaud Arbery had demanded Friday morning a “maximum punishment”. They “targeted my son because they didn’t want him in their neighborhood”, assured Ahmaud Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones.
The lawyers for the three men pleaded one last time an unintentional act which did not deserve imprisonment until death. The defendants claimed to have taken Ahmaud Arbery for a burglar, after seeing him a few days earlier enter a house under construction.
Ahmaud Arbery’s name was chanted in the major anti-racist protests that rocked the country in the summer of 2020, after the death of George Floyd, an African-American killed by a white police officer.