Ahmaud Arbery Update: Killers Seek New Trial In Lynching Murder
Ahmaud Arbery’s Convicted Killers Desperately Seek New Trial For Lynching Unarmed Black Jogger - Page 37
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UPDATED: 8:00 a.m. ET, Oct. 24, 2024
Originally published: May 26, 2020
Nearly ten months after asking a federal judge to throw out their hate crime convictions, the three white men who were found guilty of racially profiling and murdering unarmed Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery will be represented in a Georgia court on Thursday in an ambitious effort to seek a new trial.
Lawyers for father and son Greg and Travis McMichael and their neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, who were all convicted of murdering Arbery in 2020, filed a motion months ago requesting a new trial based on several “amended arguments,” according to News4Jax:
They range from a jury pool who they say could hear protestors outside the courthouse during jury selection to the true definition of a citizen’s arrest, and how they say the law governing the action had changed. The defense even accuses prosecutors of using facial expressions throughout the trial to sway the jury.
The hearing for a new motion was scheduled back in June. It is set to be held at the Glynn County Courthouse in Brunswick with Judge Timothy R. Walmsley — who sentenced the murderous trio — presiding.
Previously, the three men were set to have an appeal of their hate crime convictions heard in March.
What happened to Ahmaud Arbery?
The tragic story begins with father and son Gregory and Travis McMichael and their friend William “Roddie” Bryan, who were all shown on video actively participating in Arbery’s killing in the middle of a street in broad daylight on Feb. 23, 2020. They were each facing life sentences for their roles in the racist and vigilante shooting that bore all the hallmarks of a modern-day lynching.
The three men were accused of racially Ahmaud Arbery, arming themselves, jumping in trucks, chasing him down, blocking his path in the streets, and then shooting him to death.
Holding them accountable has been a long time coming for Arbery’s loved ones and attorneys representing his family, who have been seeking justice in a case that was seemingly covered up by his murderers and their apparent accomplices in law enforcement, all with a cruel, allegedly racist twist.
The imagery associated with the horrific narrative surrounding the shooting and accused murderers harkened back to harrowing tales of racist white mob justice in the Jim Crow South.
Ahead of the murder trial, Arbery’s mother chose to recognize the positive instead of allowing herself to be consumed by the obvious negative on the bad on the grim anniversary of her son’s death at the young age of 25.
“It still hurts that I lost Ahmaud,” Wanda Cooper-Jones told the Atlanta Journal Constitution in an interview published Feb. 23, the anniversary of her son’s death. “Knowing that Ahmaud was possibly involved in change tells me he didn’t lose his life in vain.”
The events leading up to and including Arbery’s killing in the town of Brunswick have been unfolding in a complicated and tangled timeline amplified by an explosive collision of the South’s good old boy network with a very focused and resolute movement for Black lives.
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To say that the story has developed slowly would be an understatement. After all, the McMichaels were arrested and charged with murder more than two months after Ahmaud Arbery was killed. It would take another two weeks before Bryan, the man who filmed the shooting, would meet the same fate and be taken into custody and also be charged with felony murder along with criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment. That last charge likely stemmed from his role in using the vehicle he was in to trap Arbery between his and the McMichaels’ trucks as seen on the video recorded by Bryan that was shown to the world when it leaked — inexplicably by Gregory McMichaels — and posted to social media in May.
The shooting resulted in a series of Georgia’s district attorneys playing an unfortunate game of hot potato with the case, which has been marred from the start with a web of conflicts of interest from prosecutors whose associations with each other and the accused murderers have contributed to a massive delay of justice.
One of the central themes emerging from the case is Georgia’s glaring lack of hate crime laws. The case merits a hate crime charge, lawyers representing Arbery’s family have maintained. Civil rights attorneys S. Lee Merritt and Ben Crump have been calling for the Department of Justice to get involved to determine whether federal hate crime charges are warranted against Gregory McMichael, who actually pulled the trigger and killed Arbery.
Another persistent theme in the case was the revelation of an incestuous and possibly corrupt relationship between multiple district attorneys’ offices across the state of Georgia, resulting in three prosecutors being forced to recuse themselves because of conflicts of interest.
Because of those themes, all 14 of Georgia’s Congressional representatives sent a letter last year to then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr encouraging the use of “all possible Federal resources to achieve full justice, transparency, and accountability in the case of Mr. Ahmaud Arbery.”
There was also the apparent campaign to criminalize Arbery in death to contend with, as a flurry of reputation-damaging yet ultimately irrelevant references to his past encounters with law enforcement that could never justify the killing of an unarmed man fueled by racist suspicions. That was the case when a video of police harassing Arbery from 2017 was widely published. This was the same police department that decided against making any arrests in Arbery’s killing until federal intervention pressured them to do so more than two months later.
Keep reading to find a complete and detailed timeline of the events that led up to Arbery’s shooting and those that have transpired since as his family works to achieve some semblance of justice in their loved one’s killing committed in unabashed cold blood.
6. Feb. 23
Ahmaud Arbery is killed in the middle of a road in broad daylight after the McMichaels purportedly suspect him as a burglar, arm themselves, hop in their truck and chase him, trap him, ambush him and shoot him to death.
Pictured: A young girl looks at a memorial for Ahmaud Arbery near where he was shot and killed in Brunswick, Georgia.
9. Feb. 29, 2020
Ahmaud Arbery is buried at his funeral.
Pictured: Wanda Cooper-Jones, Arbery’s mother, weeps while people gather to honor her son in Brunswick, Georgia, on May 9, 2020.
21. May 9, 2020
Armed members of the Black Panther Party patrol the white neighborhood where Ahmaud Arbery was killed as part of a larger demonstration demanding justice in the killing.
24. May 12, 2020
The full graphic video of Arbery being hunted by the McMichaels and killed is made public.
On the same day, Arbery’s autopsy results are made public and found that he was shot twice in the chest and once on his wrist. It also determined there were no drugs or alcohol in Arbery’s system at the time of his death. The autopsy declared that Arbery’s manner of death was a homicide.
26. May 14, 2020
Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son, Travis McMichael, 34, are formally charged with murder and aggravated assault.
29. May 20, 2020
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation executes a search warrant at the McMichaels’ home.
Pictured: Protesters demonstrate in the Satilla Shores neighborhood where Gregory and Travis McMichael live and where Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed in Brunswick, Georgia.
31. May 21, 2020
William “Roddy” Bryan, the man who filmed the McMichaels’ ambush and killing of Ahmaud Arbery, is arrested on charges of felony murder and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced.
34. June 17, 2020
William “Roddy” Bryan, who filmed Arbery’s shooting, was denied bail as he and the other two suspected white supremacists involved in the vigilante shooting all pleaded not guilty to murder on July 17, 2020.
Bryan also requested to remove the prosecutor, Holmes, from the case as well as a gag order for Arbery’s mother. It was all denied.
That same day, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation tweeted that Bryan was also the subject of a child molestation investigation. The GBI described the investigation as “active and ongoing.”
35. November 2020
Travis McMichael was described in court as a raging racist by the defense’s witnesses as well as the prosecution when the accused murderer’s “best friend” admitted under oath that the two of them “exchanged text messages littered with racist tropes and ugly stereotypes about African-Americans and Asians,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The revelation was the latest evidence that McMichael likely had racist motivations in going after Arbery.
Co-defendant Bryan also told investigators that McMichael called Arbery a “fucking nigger” after shooting the jogger three times at close range with a shotgun.
37. January 2021
William “Roddie” Bryan — who filmed his buddies chase down Arbery in a truck, trap him and shoot him in broad daylight in the middle of a road because they racially and falsely profiled the jogger as a burglar — had his request for bail denied once again after a judge heard his latest reason why he wanted to be released: high blood pressure.
38. February 2021
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp announced reform surrounding a Civil War-era citizens arrest law that was initially cited as a reason to not pursue charges against the killers of Ahmaud Arbery.
With some exceptions, the proposed bill would prevent private citizens from conducting arrests on others. The new bill, proposed by Kemp, states that a detained person must be released if authorities do not arrive within an hour.
“Ahmaud was a victim of vigilante-style of violence that has no place in Georgia,” Kemp said. “And some tried to justify the actions of his killers by claiming they had the protection of an antiquated law that is ripe for abuse.”
39. Feb. 23, 2021
Wanda Cooper-Jones, mother of Ahmaud Arbery, spoke to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ahead of the one-year mark of her son’s killing.
“Ahmaud was killed in a very senseless manner,” Cooper-Jones told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “They didn’t care about it. They tried to cover it up. They didn’t value, they didn’t respect Ahmaud’s life. If these guys go to jail for the rest of their lives, it won’t bring Ahmaud back.”
She continued: “He’s never going to come back. Not next week, not next month, not next year. I’m just finally getting that reality check.”
40. April 2021
It was announced that the three men accused of murdering Arbery would face federal hate crime charges for the killing. The trio was indicted by a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Georgia and charged with hate crimes and the attempted kidnapping of Arbery.
“Travis McMichael, 35; Travis’s father, Gregory McMichael, 65; and William “Roddie” Bryan, 51, were each charged with one count of interference with rights and with one count of attempted kidnapping,” the DOJ statement reads. “Travis and Gregory McMichael were also charged with one count each of using, carrying, and brandishing—and in Travis’s case, discharging—a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence.”
41. May 2021
It was reported that Gregory McMichael downplayed the broad day killing as a virtue and not an immoral act during a phone call from jail to his brother.
“You’ve heard the saying that no good deed goes unpunished?” Gregory McMichael reportedly asked.
“Yeah, that’s the shining example right there,” Gregory McMichael’s brother affirms.
There are reportedly “thousands of hours of jailhouse phone calls” his lawyer is trying to exclude from the case.
Earlier that same month, Travis McMichael’s lawyer said he wanted to enter Arbery’s criminal record and testimony about his alleged mental illness admitted as evidence in an effort to apparently justify the killing.
43. October 2021
Days ahead of the start of jury selection for the murder trial against the McMichaels and Bryan, their defense lawyer argued the jury should know that Arbery was on probation on the day of his killing. The defense argued that allowing Arbery’s probation into evidence might explain why he ran from the three men who were armed with visible guns and chasing the jogger in separate motor vehicles. The attorneys also argued that, somehow, knowledge of Arbery’s probation will counter the narrative that their clients “only chased after [Arbery] because they were violent racists who did not want a Black man jogging in their mostly white neighborhood,” according to the motion the lawyers filed.
44. November 11, 2021
Glynn County police Sgt. Roderic Nohilly testified that when speaking with the elder McMichael at police headquarters after the shooting, Greg told him Arbery “wasn’t out for no Sunday jog. He was getting the hell out of there.”
Nohilly also read transcripts of their conversation in court that made Greg almost appear to be bragging about his redneck Avengers squad chasing Arbery around and preventing him from leaving.
“He was trapped like a rat,” Greg said, according to the transcript. “I think he was wanting to flee and he realized that something, you know, he was not going to get away.”
“He had an opportunity to flee further, you know?” Greg continued. “We had chased him around the neighborhood a bit, but he wasn’t winded at all. I mean this guy was, he was in good shape.”
48. January 31, 2022
A Georgia judge on Monday rejected a proposed plea deal for the men who were convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery. The plea would have allowed the men to skip a hate crimes trial and serve most of their prison time in a federal prison instead of a state prison.
The proposed deal would have allowed Gregory and Travis McMichael to serve their federal sentences concurrently with their state sentences. Both men would have also served most of their prison time in a federal prison instead of a state prison. Court documents did not mention a similar agreement for William ‘Roddie’ Bryan, the other man convicted in the murder of Arbery.
49. February 16, 2022
Racism was at the forefront in the federal trial for the three men who were convicted of killing Ahmaud Arbery.
During the trial prosecutors laid out examples from text messages where all three men used racial slurs and made racially insensitive comments leading up to Ahmaud Arbery’s death. Defense attorneys for the three men had no choice but to admit their clients used racial slurs in the past but said their words had no barring over their decision to approach Arbery the night they killed him.
According to prosecutors, they will prove that Travis McMichael texted a friend that he loved his job because “zero n——rs work with me.” They also have a testimony that McMichael said while watching a video of a Black man playing with fireworks, “It’d be cooler if it blew the f—-ing n——r’s head off.”
His father Greg McMichael had also been heard using insensitive racial remarks when speaking to a former co-worker. Prosecutors claim Greg said during a conversation about the death of Julian Bond, “Those Blacks are all nothing but trouble.”
Prosecutors also allege neighbor William Bryan was upset when he learned that his daughter was dating a Black man and said she, “has her n——-r now.”
Ahmaud Arbery’s Convicted Killers Desperately Seek New Trial For Lynching Unarmed Black Jogger - Page 37 was originally published on newsone.com
