(Washington) The family of black jogger Ahmaud Arbery, shot dead by white men in February 2020 in the South of the United States, said on Monday they felt “betrayed” by the Department of Justice, which negotiated an agreement with two of his murderers.
Posted at 12:37 p.m.
Travis McMichael, 36, his father Gregory McMichael, 65, and their neighbor William Bryan, 52, were sentenced to life in prison by a Georgia state court following a trial that only touched on the racist dimension of their crime.
On the other hand, this was to be at the heart of a second trial, in February, organized this time by the federal justice which charged the three men with “racist crime”.
PHOTO STEPHEN B. MORTON, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES
Travis McMichael.
But the McMichaels have reached a plea bargain with federal prosecutors, according to court documents released late Sunday night.
This agreement, if validated by a judge, will avoid a new trial and allow them to serve part of their sentence in a federal prison, in exchange for an admission of guilt.
It “represents a betrayal for the Arbery family” who “strongly oppose it”, said their lawyer Lee Merritt. “The Department of Justice is turning a victory into a defeat. »
According to him, the Arbery family “fought hard to ensure that these men spend the rest of their lives in state prisons” and sending them to “better secure, less crowded and better managed federal detention centers” would amount to offer them “a reward”.
Ahmaud Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper Jones, intends to plead her case on Monday before the judge responsible for the case. “I made it clear at all stages that I was not in agreement with any deal being offered to them,” she said in a statement.
His son, 25, was jogging in Brunswick on February 23, 2020, when he was chased by the three men, armed and aboard two vans. After a few minutes of chase, Travis McMichael had finally shot him down.
The three men then claimed to have taken him for an active burglar in the neighborhood and wanted to arrest him.
For more than two months, the police did not make any arrests and it took the broadcast of a video of the tragedy, relayed massively on social networks in early May, for the investigation to be withdrawn from them and really start.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.