Tale of two cases

Why we give these to juries

“After a jury deliberating for 31/2 days rendered not guilty verdicts on all five counts, many expressed surprise and anger. It’s probably because they had already made up their minds, and more importantly, had not watched the trial on television. Anyone who did realized quickly that most of the conventional pretrial understanding of what happened was wrong.”

— Our editorial, on Kyle Rittenhouse, last week

Now comes another trial entirely. And with it, an entirely different verdict. As if cases need to be judged by a jury of peers, on a caseby-case basis, instead of judged in the court of public opinion after a 20-second TV spot.

Three men were convicted Wednesday afternoon in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, the Black man in Georgia who was out running one day when the three men chased him down and shot him. They all face mandatory life sentences. The only question before the judge now is whether any of them, or all of them, or none of them, will ever be eligible for parole.

It took the jury 10 hours to decide 23 guilty verdicts in the case.

“Let the word go forth all over the world, that a jury of 11 whites and one Black stood up in the Deep South and said Black lives matter,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, who always seems to be before the cameras in these cases. But he wasn’t wrong.

Greg and Travis McMichael, a father-son duo, and a neighbor of theirs, William Bryan, jumped into trucks to pursue Ahmaud Arbery when he was running through their neighborhood in February 2020. The McMichaels were armed, and Mr. Bryan had a cellphone to video the encounter. The McMichaels told authorities they suspected Mr. Arbery was a fleeing burglar. The prosecution says there was no evidence Ahmaud Arbery committed any crime.

Defense attorneys said the McMichaels were attempting a “citizen’s arrest” when they took off after Ahmaud Arbery, and were “seeking to detain and question him after he was seen running from a nearby home under construction.”

According to CNN, the elder McMichael told police he and his son chased down Ahmaud Arbery because they suspected him of being involved in a “string of recent purported burglaries” in their neighborhood.

A police spokesperson later said there had only been one burglary reported in that neighborhood in the seven weeks before the shooting. “Additionally, [Greg] McMichael said he saw Arbery inside a home under construction. Arbery was seen entering the home in surveillance video at the site, but the owner of the home told CNN he did not see Arbery commit any crime the day of the shooting. Other surveillance videos showed multiple people had trespassed at the home under construction.”

But now Ahmaud Arbery is dead. And three men are going to jail for it.

These three men deserved the trial. A jury decided they deserved the verdict. And it appears as though the jury got it right. Everything we’ve seen in the press wrenches a “whatthe-hell?” response to the actions of these three men.

But it wasn’t the press, or public opinion, that convicted them. It was the legal process, and a jury. Which sifted through even more details than we’ve seen in the papers.

The system doesn’t always work. But it’s the best system mankind has invented to date.