Killing stirs call to scrap citizen arrest

SAVANNAH, Ga. — A group of Georgia lawmakers called Friday for the legislature to quickly scrap the state’s 19th-century citizen arrest law, which one prosecutor cited in a controversial legal opinion justifying the pursuit and killing of Ahmaud Arbery.

Democratic Rep. Carl Gilliard of Savannah told a news conference Friday the proposal will be introduced when the state House and Senate reconvene next week following a three-month recess forced by the coronavirus pandemic. Two Republicans have agreed to co-sponsor the bill.

Arbery was fatally shot Feb. 23 after a white father and son armed themselves and pursued the 25-year-old black man as he ran through their neighborhood outside the port city of Brunswick. Greg McMichael told police he suspected Arbery had committed prior breakins in the area. More than two months passed before McMichael, his son Travis McMichael, and a neighbor who joined the chase, William “Roddie” Bryan Jr., were charged with felony murder.

The first prosecutor assigned to the case, Waycross Circuit District Attorney George Barnhill, concluded in an April letter to police that the three men were legally justified “to stop and hold” Arbery as a “criminal suspect until law enforcement arrived.” Barnhill also said it was his legal opinion that Travis McMichael shot Arbery in self-defense. Barnhill offered those opinions as he recused himself from the case because his son worked with Greg McMichael in the Brunswick district attorney’s office.

Passed in 1863, the Georgia law allows ordinary citizens to arrest suspected felons “upon reasonable and probable grounds of suspicion.”

Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which took over the case from local police in early May, rejected the idea that the three men were attempting a legal citizen arrest or acting in self-defense when Arbery was killed. GBI agent Richard Dial testified in court Thursday there’s no evidence Arbery committed crimes in the subdivision where he was shot.