Jury selection begins in trial over Ahmaud Arbery’s death
BRUNSWICK, GA.»Jury selection got underway Monday in Georgia, with hundreds of people ordered to report for what could be a lengthy effort to find jurors in the trial of three white men charged with fatally shooting Ahmaud Arbery as he was running in their neighborhood.
The slaying of the 25-year-old Black man sparked a national outcry fueled by graphic video of the shooting leaked online more than two months after Arbery was killed. Father and son Greg and Travis McMichael and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan are charged with murder and other crimes in Arbery’s death on Feb. 23, 2020, just outside the port city of Brunswick.
Jury selection could last two weeks or more. Arbery’s father said he was praying for an impartial panel and a fair trial, saying Black crime victims too often have been denied justice.
“This is 2021, and it’s time for a change,” Marcus Arbery Sr. said in an interview. “We need to be treated equally and get fair justice as human beings, because we’ve been treated wrong so long.”
The first panel of 20 jurors was sworn in and questioned Monday afternoon.
When Judge Timothy Walmsley asked the group if their minds were neutral regarding both sides of the case, only one raised a hand. Asked if they were already leaning toward either side, about half raised their hands to indicate yes.
Prosecutor Linda Dunikoski questioned the group next. “Please raise your card if you would like to serve on this jury,” was her final question.
At first, nobody did. Finally, one young man raised his hand.
Jason Sheffield, one of
Travis McMichael’s attorneys, asked the group whether they had any negative feelings about the three defendants. More than half raised their hands.
The judge dismissed three of the group, including a law enforcement officer, for cause without questioning them individually.
The first to be questioned was an Air Force veteran and gun owner who said he has a negative impression of Greg McMichael, but not the other defendants.
“I got the impression he was stalking,” the man said, saying he based that on news coverage and from seeing the video of the shooting “fewer than five times.”
“From what I observed, he appeared to be the lead dog,” the panel member said of Greg McMichael, a retired investigator for the local district attorney’s office. Still, he said he had not made up his mind about Greg McMichael’s innocence or guilt.
The second panelist questioned said he had seen so much about the slaying in the news and on social media that “I’m sick of it.”
He said he shared the video of Arbery’s shooting on social media and discussed the case with his brothers — one of whom was also among the 1,000 people mailed a jury summons in the case.
He said he was worried he could suffer personally if he were part of the jury, adding: “I don’t want to have to relocate because of something that goes wrong.”