Whites on trial for the death of black jogger
Three white men in the southern US state of Georgia will go on trial this week over the high-profile shooting death of a black jogger that sparked a national outcry and helped fuel last year’s social justice protests.
Gregory McMichael, 65, his son Travis, 35, and their neighbour William Bryan, 52, have been charged with murder and aggravated assault after chasing 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery and shooting him dead during a confrontation in February 2020.
The father and son had followed Arbery in a pickup
truck, while Bryan trailed them in his own vehicle and filmed the scene. After an altercation, Travis McMichael opened fire and killed Arbery.
The three men contend that they mistook the jogger for a burglar active in the area and invoked a Georgia law allowing ordinary citizens to make arrests.
Local prosecutors, for whom Gregory McMichael, a retired police officer, had worked for a long time, did not make any arrests in the case for nearly three months.
It was only after the video of the shooting was leaked online and shared widely on social media that the case was transferred to state police and the three suspects were arrested and charged.
The murder of another black man, George Floyd, two weeks later under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis reignited a national debate on racial justice and police violence against African-Americans, and Arbery became one of the symbols of the Black Lives Matter national protests that ensued.
“A black man should be able to jog without fearing for his life,” President Joe Biden tweeted on the anniversary of Arbery’s death.
Jury selection is expected to last several days, given the intense media scrutiny of the case. The defendants are then expected to plead self-defence, arguing that Arbery was resisting their “lawful arrest”.
Prosecutors will insist the victim was unarmed and that nothing links him to a series of burglaries that took place in the neighbourhood.
Ben Crump, a civil rights lawyer who has represented a number of African-American families in police violence cases, said he hoped the court “will see through this tactic and deliver Ahmaud and his family justice”.
“If these killers get off … that sends the message that lynching black men in 2021 carries no penalty,” he said.