Broader jury pool sought for Arbery hate crimes trial

SAVANNAH, Ga. — Attorneys in the upcoming federal hate crimes trial of the three white men who chased and killed Ahmaud Arbery want the jury pool to come from an expansive area of Georgia that covers 43 counties, including some that are a four-hour drive from the courthouse where the trial will be held.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys filed a joint motion last week in U.S. District Court, with both sides in agreement that casting a wider net for potential jurors will improve the odds of seating an impartial jury. The first trial in Arbery’s slaying, seen by many as a reckoning on racial injustice in the legal system, resulted in murder convictions in a state court the day before Thanksgiving.

Father and son Greg and Travis McMichael and their neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, were all found guilty of murder and other crimes in the Feb. 23, 2020, killing of Arbery. Bryan recorded cell phone video of Travis McMichael blasting the 25-year-old Black man with a shotgun after Arbery spent several minutes running as the three men chased him in pickup trucks.

The murder trial in state court was not the end of the legal troubles for the McMichaels and Bryan. They now face hate crime charges at the federal level that allege they violated Arbery’s civil rights, unjustly pursuing and threatening him on a public street, because he was Black.

A judge has scheduled jury selection in the federal trial to begin Feb. 7. The McMichaels and Bryan pleaded not guilty to the hate crime charges in May.

Like the state trial, the federal case will be tried in Glynn County, where the killing occurred just outside the port city of Brunswick. Typically, a federal jury would be drawn from residents of Glynn County as well as six neighboring counties that make up the Brunswick Division of the federal court system’s Southern District of Georgia.

“The parties believe that it is likely that many potential jurors from the Brunswick Division will have experienced sustained exposure to the case and may have formed immutable opinions, in one direction or the other, that will ultimately preclude them from sitting on a jury in this case,” the attorneys said in their filing.

In a separate court filing, Travis McMichael’s attorney, Amy Lee Copeland, asked the judge to consider moving the trial to a different city within the same judicial district, such as Savannah or Augusta.

The attorneys noted that court rules allow for a jury pool to be assembled from the entire Southern District, which has a population of more than 1.6 million people. Each U.S. state has between one and four federal court districts, which vary substantially by size and population.

Georgia’s Southern District covers 43 of its 159 counties. Farthest from the courthouse is rural Wilkes County, located more than 210 miles north of Brunswick.

The next pretrial hearing in the federal case is scheduled for Dec. 20.