Guilty on murder charges......

All three defendants guilty on murder charges in Ahmaud Arbery case

The three men convicted in Arbery's death are Greg and Travis McMichael, and their neighbor William "Roddie" Bryan.

By NICK NIEDZWIADEK

The three men on trial in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery were convicted Wednesday by a Georgia jury on murder charges, closing a case that became a fixture of debates about racial injustice in America.

The three convicted in Arbery’s death are Greg and Travis McMichael, a father and son who chased after Arbery in February of 2020 in a pickup truck after they saw him running through their neighborhood, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, who recorded cellphone footage of Travis McMichael shooting Arbery.

The jury was not persuaded by the McMichaels’ claims that they pursued Arbery because they thought he was a burglar. The defense blamed Arbery for his own death, arguing in court that his resistance to the men’s attempts to detain him before police arrived led Travis McMichael to fear for his life and fire the fatal shotgun rounds.

Each of the men was found guilty on multiple murder counts, as well as charges of aggravated assault and false imprisonment, and all three face potential sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole. However, only Travis McMichael was convicted of all nine charges brought against each of them.

The Arbery case gained public notice for several reasons, including the racial implications of several armed white men pursuing a Black man, and also because the fatal shooting took place in the political battleground state of Georgia. Attention on the case exploded in early May 2020, when Bryan’s cellphone video of the attack surfaced online and each of the three men was subsequently arrested — more than two months after Arbery was killed.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki this week declined to comment on the murder trial or whether President Joe Biden had tuned in to its televised proceedings, continuing a practice employed earlier in the month during the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. The Illinois teenager was cleared of all charges by a jury after maintaining that he was defending himself when he fatally shot two men and wounded another last year during a chaotic nighttime protest in Kenosha, Wis.

Responding to questions from reporters, Psaki referred back to Biden’s comments on the Arbery case made prior to the trial. Earlier this year, the president posted a tweet marking the anniversary of Aubrey’s death. And as a presidential candidate last year, he called the attack a “grave injustice” and characterized it as a lynching.

Biden did comment following the Rittenhouse verdict, expressing solidarity with those upset by his acquittal on all charges while upholding juries as a bedrock of the American criminal legal system.

“The jury system works, and we have to abide by it,” Biden said on Nov. 19.

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) said shortly after the verdict that it “upholds a sense of accountability, but not true justice.”

“True justice looks like a Black man not having to worry about being harmed — or killed — while on a jog, while sleeping in his bed, while living what should be a very long life,” Warnock, who earlier this year became the first Black Georgian elected to the U.S. Senate, wrote on Twitter.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, said that Arbery “was the victim of a vigilantism that has no place in Georgia.”

The issue of race has been nearly inseparable from the rest of the Arbery trial, even as prosecutors largely steered clear of directly referencing its potential role in the episode.

The jury was disproportionately white, with only one Black juror among the 12 selected. Earlier in the trial, one of the defense attorneys unsuccessfully sought to restrict the number of Black clergy in the gallery of the courtroom, and on Monday requested a mistrial over concerns that the vociferous crowd outside the courthouse could sway the jury.

Wednesday’s verdict does not mark the end of the legal ramifications of Arbery’s murder.

Arbery’s estate has filed a federal civil rights suit over his killing and the handling of the investigation by local authorities. Each of the three defendants also faces federal hate crime charges slated for trial in February, and a former local prosecutor was indicted in September on charges of using her office to “favor” the men connected to Arbery’s death.

The jury deliberated for little more than a day before returning their guilty verdicts for the three men, concluding ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. The trial began on Nov. 5.