(Washington) Three white Americans convicted of chasing and killing young black jogger Ahmaud Arbery two years ago were also found guilty on Tuesday of “racist crime” by a federal jury.
Posted at 11:10 a.m.
Travis McMichael, 36, his father Gregory McMichael, 66, and their neighbor William Bryan, 52, had previously been convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery and sentenced to life in prison by a Georgia state court .
But this first trial had only scratched the surface of the racist dimension of the drama, unlike this second federal trial which put this question at the center of the debates.
Since its opening, the prosecution has notably listed the particularly violent racist insults uttered by the three men in the past, with the aim of accounting for the state of mind of the defendants when they embarked on the pursuit of Ahmaud Arbery. According to the prosecutor, the son McMichael had for example described African-Americans as “criminals”, “monkeys”, “savages and sub-humans”.
The deliberations of the jury, made up of eight white people, three black people and one Hispanic, lasted less than a day.
On February 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was jogging in Brunswick, a coastal town in Georgia, when he was chased by the three men, armed and aboard two pickup trucks. After a few minutes of chase, Travis McMichael had shot him.
For more than two months, the police had made no arrests and it took the broadcast of a video of the tragedy, relayed massively on the internet, for the investigation to start. Ahmaud Arbery then became an emblem of the Black Lives Matter movement (black lives matter) during the major anti-racist demonstrations in the summer of 2020.
During their first trial, the three men claimed to have taken the young African-American for an active burglar in the neighborhood and wanted to arrest him.