The Arbery verdict: What does it tell us?
“Maybe there’s a glimmer of hope for justice in the United States,” said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. Travis McMichael, his father, Greg, and neighbor William Bryan were found guilty of murder, false imprisonment, and aggravated assault by a Brunswick, Ga., jury after chasing and shooting to death Ahmaud Arbery, a young Black man jogging in their mostly white neighborhood. It was “a classic lynching” of the kind white mobs “once regularly committed against Black Americans with impunity.” But this time, a video of the murder was so incriminating, a jury of 11 whites and one Black person quickly came back with guilty verdicts. Yes, but don’t draw larger conclusions about our criminal justice system from this highly publicized case, said Radley Balko, also in the Post. A 2017 survey by the Marshall Project found that when a white person kills a Black person, “the killing is about eight times more likely to be deemed justified” than other killings. When no one is watching, our system is still riddled with racial bias.
Our system “is not perfect,” said Tiana Lowe in the Washington Examiner, but it works far better than progressives contend. Even after the McMichaels were convicted, the Left couldn’t stop complaining about the Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal in Wisconsin, even though prosecutors found “zero evidence” of racism or white supremacy in his social media history. Why not celebrate two correct verdicts? Sorry, but the truth is that Arbery’s killers almost never faced charges, said Ilya Somin in Reason.com. The original local prosecutor, Jackie Johnson, ordered police not to arrest the McMichaels. It was only when the video of the shooting was leaked to the media that the McMichaels were charged—and Johnson was indicted for violating her oath of office.
This trial could have easily “gone the other way,” said Leonard Pitts Jr. in the Miami Herald. Defense lawyer Laura Hogue tried to stoke the nearly all-white jury’s “racial fears,” describing Arbery with contempt as a scary, disgusting man who had “no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails.” In other words, the n-word “deserved what he got.” After Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, and so many other Black men were killed without consequences, these convictions gave African-Americans a brief feeling of “relief.” But in America, justice remains “elusive, fickle, and unreliable.”