WERE THOSE THAT KILLED AHMAUD ARERY GUILTY OF BIAS TOWARD BLACKS?

 

… Ahmaud Arbery's mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, center, is surrounded by supporters Jan. 7 after a judge sentenced three men to prison for murdering her son.

Was Amaud Abrey murdered, just because he was Black?

Most Americans don’t understand why the three individuals that were found guilty for killing Ahmaud Arbery, why they must also go through another federal trial for a hate crime.

Why is there a hate crime trial after a murder trial?

The point of a hate crime trial is if someone is killed, was it because the killer was biased against them?  In a hate crime, the prosecutors must prove that the killing was because of their bias toward that individual(s).  Just being a racist isn’t enough evidence.  You have to have killed them because of your bias against them.

In this case, the prosecutors are seeking to prove that Mr. McMichael; his father, Greg McMichael; and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan attacked Arbery out of racial bias. These men have instead said they went after him as they suspected him of wrongdoing.  All three were convicted of murder last fall and sentenced to life in prison, with Bryan, the only one, eligible for parole after 30 years.

But now they federal government must prove that the real reason that they went after Arbery was because he was Black.

As an example of where the prosecutors are headed, one of the three White men that was convicted in Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, he said that he did not want his daughter dating a Black man.  He also called the Black man a “nigger” in a text message.

Travis McMichael, who was the one that actually shot Arbery, he had spoken about killing Black people and wrote in a message that he loved his job because: “zero niggers work with me.”

“We used to walk around committing hate crimes all day,” he wrote in another text conversation a few months before the shooting.

In the second day of testimony in the federal hate-crimes trial, it opened with an FBI analyst detailing dozens of racist social media posts and messages allegedly sent by the three men who chased and killed Arbery, that was a 25-year-old Black man..

Their original murder trial, was in state court before a nearly an all-White jury, and the prosecutors avoided any direct allegations of racism. The federal trial, in contrast, focuses squarely on whether the McMichaels and Bryan targeted Arbery because he was Black.  Arbery’s death helped spark nationwide social justice protests, along with the police killings of Breonna Taylor in Louisville and George Floyd in Minneapolis. Of those three slayings, only Arbery’s has resulted in federal hate-crime charges.  This raised the stakes for the federal prosecutors.

“This is the kind of case you really need to send the message that the Federal Justice Department won’t tolerate this type of racist hatred that results in violence,” said Shan Wu, a former federal prosecutor in D.C.

Legal experts have emphasized that federal prosecutors cannot win a conviction merely by proving the defendants are racist. They must show the jury something more specific: “that bias toward Black people led the McMichaels and Bryan to actually act.”

“The most compelling pieces of evidence will always be those that are most directly tied to the incident at hand,” Avlana Eisenberg, a Florida State University law professor who has researched hate-crime prosecutions, said in an interview. She noted that proving motive can be more challenging, but she also warned that acquittals in a hate-crimes case would deepen a disconnect between official findings and the “court of public opinion.”

Arbery’s family has said he was out for a jog in the neighborhood when the defendants chased him down in pickup trucks and confronted him. Travis McMichael fatally shot Arbery and claimed self-defense, an argument that a local district attorney had quickly had accepted.  That was before Bryan’s video of the shooting went viral and forced a different scrutiny.  In addition, Arbery did not have a weapon.

Travis and Greg McMichael have said they pursued Arbery not because of his race, but because they suspected him of break-ins and potential theft.  Arbery had entered an under-construction home in their area a few times in the weeks leading up to the shooting, and did so again on the day he was shot.  But the police had told Greg McMichael, who was a former police officer and investigator with the district attorney’s office, and his son, that surveillance footage did not show Arbery taking anything from the property in those earlier visits.

Bryan said he saw the McMichaels pursuing Arbery on Feb. 23 and joined the chase in his pickup truck, figuring that the young Black man had “done something wrong.”  Arbery had not taken anything from the house on that day either.

On the 3^rd day of trial, FBI intelligence analyst Amy Vaughan testified about investigators’ review of the defendants’ phone messages and social media.  She spent most of her time on Travis McMichael, 36, walking the jury through a litany of conversations in which he denigrated Black people, often while calling them “niggers”.  She said McMichael associated Black people with criminality, spoke explicitly about committing violence against them and blamed them when he struggled to get a commercial driver’s license, accusing the “niggers” of “running the show,” Vaughan testified.

“I say shoot all of them,” Travis McMichael’s commented on a video that showed a group of mostly Black teenagers attacking a White teenager. He also appeared to advocate running over protesters in response to a video of a car hitting Black women.  When someone sent McMichael a video in which a Black man plays a prank on a White man, he used a racial epithet in saying he would have killed the prankster.

Turning to Bryan, 52, Vaughan testified that text messages showed Bryan’s running joke with a friend about serving as “grand marshal” of a parade on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. “I think the joke is that he would never do that,” she told the jury.  While texting about the federal holiday, Vaughan added, Bryan referred to Black people using multiple racial slurs and he referenced a “monkey parade.”

Four days before Arbery was shot, the prosecutor said, Bryan used the n-word to refer to his daughter’s boyfriend, who was Black.

In another text conversation the same day, someone passed on a message from the daughter saying. “Yes, he’s Black … But honestly, it’s just a color,” she said, according to the message read in court. “It doesn’t define him or make me love him any less.”

Greg McMichael was less active than his son on Facebook, Vaughan said, and law enforcement agents were unable to break through the encryption on his phone to see his messages.  But they gleaned some information from online backups of the device and found the elder McMichael sometimes posted memos on Facebook, including the one that said White Irish slaves were treated worse than other enslaved groups. “When was the last time you heard an Irishman (expletive) about how the world owes them a living?” the memo continued, according to Vaughan.

Members of the federal jury of eight White people, three Black people and one Hispanic person, watched intently as the evidence was presented.  Leigh McMichael, Travis’s mother and Greg’s wife, sat in the courtroom without a visible reaction.

In their opening statements, defense lawyers for the McMichaels acknowledged that their clients have said reprehensible things about Black people, but they noted for the jurors that such words are not illegal.  Bryan’s attorney said the jurors would see “different levels” of racism and argued that “Roddie is not a man who sees the entire world through the prism of race.”

Only one defense lawyer had questions for Vaughan.  Amy Lee Copeland, who represents Travis McMichael, had the analyst affirm that “context is important” and asked to have the jury watch some of the videos her client referenced in his posts and messages. The videos were played in the courtroom, and Vaughan agreed that they contained “graphic violence.”

The video footage shows Black people assaulting White people, and Black people helping the White people injured in those assaults.  Asked by the prosecutor whether Travis McMichael commented about the Black people who were rendering aid to the victims shown in the video, Vaughan replied that he did not.

On the first day of government witness testimony, the jury had heard from local residents who lived near the scene of the shooting and they did not see a jogging Arbery as a threat.

Matthew Albenze, a longtime neighborhood resident, said he had called police on a previous day after seeing Arbery in the under-construction house.  But Albenze testified that he had called a non-emergency police line and that he did not think Arbery, whom he did not know, was doing anything other than looking around.

Another resident, who is also White, said he is a frequent runner who often jogged in the neighborhood without arousing any suspicion from his neighbors.

Cross-examining Richard Dial, an investigator with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, defense lawyers sought to establish that there had been reports of stolen items, including guns, in the neighborhood in the weeks leading up to the shooting, and that neighbors had discussed those incidents on social media.

Prosecutors have noted that Travis McMichael sought to blame Arbery for the theft of his gun on Jan. 1, 2020, even though a White person was suspected in a similar recent theft from a neighbor.  On the third day, jurors heard testimony from a friend who remembered Travis McMichael being “angry” about the theft incident.

The friend, Derek Thomas, recounted sending Travis McMichael a video on the day the gun was stolen, which showed a Black person lighting a firecracker.  Travis McMichael texted back an angry response, Thomas said.  Asked to relay the message out loud in court for the jury, he hesitated, asking the prosecutor: “Am I required by law to read that?”   The judge told him to proceed, and Thomas spelled out the n-word as he read Travis McMichael’s message: Travis McMichael had wished the Black man’s head had been blown off by the firecracker.

It is still up in the air if the three will be found guilty of acting on their bias towards Blacks.

Copyright G. Ater 2022