three white men convicted of murdering African-American jogger Ahmaud Arbery

The trial was marked by the issue of racism. Three white Americans were convicted on Wednesday, November 24, of the murder of African-American jogger Ahmaud Arbery, whom they had prosecuted and then shot dead in February 2020 in the state of Georgia. Travis McMichael, 35 and perpetrator of the fatal shots, his father Gregory McMichael, 65, and their neighbor William Bryan, 52, who participated in the chase by filming it, were on trial in Brunswick, in the southern states. -United.

The twelve jurors, including a single black man, deliberated for more than eleven hours to reach a unanimous verdict on the multiple counts of murder of varying degrees that weighed against the defendants. The three men face life imprisonment and the sentence will be pronounced later. President Joe Biden immediately welcomed the verdict in a statement (in English), recognizing that “a lot of work” remained to be done before achieving racial equality.

The three men had long enjoyed a certain leniency from the authorities: it took nearly three months and the dissemination of images of the tragedy for them to be arrested. The case had fueled the major anti-racist protests that rocked the country in the summer of 2020, in the wake of the death of another African-American, George Floyd, suffocated under the knee of a white police officer.