WASHINGTON | The jury selected to try three white men accused of the murder of black jogger Ahmaud Arbery was hotly contested in the United States on Thursday, with African-Americans all, with one exception, being excluded from the panel.
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“It is scandalous,” said lawyer Ben Crump, a specialist in cases of violence against African Americans, in a statement denouncing “a cynical effort to help killers escape justice.”
“It’s very difficult for the family who just want to have a fair trial without racial bias, but it’s part of our system,” lawyer Lee Merritt, defending Ahmaud Arbery’s mother, told local media. The latter, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said she was “shocked”.
On February 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was jogging in Brunswick, Georgia in the southeastern United States, when he was chased by three white men, Gregory McMichael, 65, his son Travis , 35, and one of their neighbor, William Bryan, 52.
After an altercation, young McMichael opened fire and killed the jogger. The three men then claimed to have mistaken him for a burglar and invoked a law in the state of Georgia allowing ordinary citizens to make arrests.
For nearly three months, the services of the local prosecutor, for whom Gregory McMichael, a retired police officer, had worked for a long time, had not made any arrests. The video of the drama had to be broadcast in early May 2020 for the three men to be arrested and charged with “murder”.
On October 18, a thousand potential jurors were summoned by the Brunswick court which must judge this emblematic case of the Black Lives Matter movement (black lives matter).
After two and a half weeks of close questioning, 64 candidates, including a dozen African Americans, had been shortlisted, reflecting the racial makeup of the county, where a quarter of the population is black.
On Wednesday, the defendants’ lawyers, however, used their right of challenge to remove from the jury all black people, except one.
In the United States, dismissing a juror solely on the basis of ethnicity is prohibited, and the prosecutor has asked the judge to strike down the maneuver.
The magistrate, Timothy Walmsley, refused. “It looks like there was intentional discrimination,” he admitted. But defense lawyers “were able to explain to the court why, regardless of race, they had challenged these jurors.”
The trial is due to get under way on Friday with the presentation of the parties’ arguments and last for several weeks.