Three Men Found Guilty of Murdering Ahmaud Arbery: Live Updates
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BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Three white men were found guilty of murder and other charges on Wednesday for the pursuit and fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, in a case that, together with the killing of George Floyd, helped inspire the racial justice protests of last year.
The three defendants — Travis McMichael, 35; his father, Gregory McMichael, 65; and their neighbor William Bryan, 52 — face sentences of up to life in prison. The men have also been indicted on separate federal charges, including hate crimes and attempted kidnapping, and are expected to stand trial in February on those charges.
The verdict suggested that the jury agreed with prosecutors’ arguments that Mr. Arbery posed no imminent threat to the men and that the men had no reason to believe he had committed a crime, giving them no legal right to chase him through their suburban neighborhood. “You can’t start it and claim self-defense,” the lead prosecutor argued in her closing statements. “And they started this.”
The outcome of the trial drew praise from Mr. Arbery’s family, who had watched the proceedings from inside the courthouse for weeks, and from civil rights leaders and activists across the country.
“I never thought this day would come, but God is good,” said Wanda Cooper-Jones, Mr. Arbery’s mother.
Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia said he hoped the verdicts would help “lead to a path of healing and reconciliation.” President Biden said the outcome reflected the justice system doing its job. But Mr. Arbery’s death, Mr. Biden said, “is a devastating reminder of how far we have to go in the fight for racial justice in this country.”
From the beginning, Mr. Arbery’s family and friends raised questions about local officials’ handling of the case. The three men who were later charged walked free for several weeks after the shooting, and were arrested only after video of the fatal encounter was released, a national outcry swelled and the case was taken over by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Until the verdicts were announced, Mr. Arbery’s family and friends were on edge. Akeem Baker, Mr. Arbery’s best friend from childhood, sat inside the courthouse with his head bowed and his eyes red from crying.
“I feel better,” he said.
Though the killing of Mr. Arbery in February 2020 did not reach the same level of notoriety as the case of Mr. Floyd, the Black man murdered by a white Minneapolis police officer three months later, Mr. Arbery’s death helped fuel widespread demonstrations and unrest that unfolded in cities across the country in the spring and summer of 2020.
The case touched on some of the most combustible themes in American criminal justice, including vigilantism, self-defense laws, the effects of widespread gun ownership and the role of race in jury selection.
The verdict came as Americans were divided over the acquittal, a few days earlier, of Kyle Rittenhouse, who asserted that he was acting in self-defense when he fatally shot two men and wounded another during protests and violence that broke out after a white police officer shot a Black resident in Kenosha, Wis.
Jurors in that case accepted Mr. Rittenhouse’s assertion that he was defending himself, a position that legal experts said can be challenging for prosecutors to overcome. But in this case, jurors clearly dismissed the contention by Travis McMichael, the only defendant who testified, that he was in a “life-or-death” situation and had no choice but to shoot Mr. Arbery in self-defense.
Like many other recent episodes involving the killing of Black people, the confrontation was captured on video. Unlike many of the others, the video was made not by a bystander but by one of the defendants, Mr. Bryan.
Jackie Johnson, the local prosecutor who initially handled the case, lost her bid for re-election in 2020 and was indicted this year by a Georgia grand jury, accused of “showing favor and affection” to Gregory McMichael, a former investigator in her office, and for directing police officers not to arrest Travis McMichael. The case was ultimately tried by the district attorney’s office in Cobb County, which is roughly 300 miles away from Brunswick in metropolitan Atlanta.
The case brought political and legal upheaval. Mr. Kemp signed a hate crimes statute into law, and sided with state lawmakers when they voted to repeal significant portions of the state’s citizen’s arrest statute.
During the trial, defense lawyers relied on that citizen’s arrest law, which was enacted in the 19th century. They argued that their clients had acted legally when, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in February 2020, they set out in two pickup trucks in an effort to detain Mr. Arbery, an avid jogger and former high school football player who spent nearly five minutes trying to run away from them.
Eventually trapped between the two pickup trucks, Mr. Arbery then ended up in a confrontation with Travis McMichael, who was armed with a shotgun and fired at Mr. Arbery three times at close range. Mr. McMichael testified that he feared that Mr. Arbery, who had no weapon, would get control of the shotgun from him and threaten his life.
Over the 10 days of testimony in the trial, prosecutors challenged the idea that an unarmed man who never spoke to his pursuers could be considered much of a threat at all.
“What’s Mr. Arbery doing?” Linda Dunikoski, the lead prosecutor, said in her closing argument. “He runs away from them. And runs away from them. And runs away from them.”
The men each faced a nine-count indictment. For each count, they were charged individually and as “parties concerned in the commission of a crime.” The counts included malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment and criminal attempt to commit the felony of false imprisonment.
Under Georgia law, malice murder is applied when a person is found to have deliberately set out to kill someone. The charge of felony murder applies when a death results in the course of another felony — regardless of whether the person intended to kill someone. Both carry a sentence of up to life in prison.
The jury found Travis McMichael, the man who shot Mr. Arbery, guilty on all nine counts, including malice murder and felony murder.
Gregory McMichael was found not guilty of malice murder, but guilty of all other counts he faced, including felony murder.
Mr. Bryan was found not guilty of malice murder. He was found not guilty of one count of felony murder and one count of aggravated assault, but guilty of three counts of felony murder and three other charges.
The lawyers for Travis McMichael told reporters that they respected the jury’s decision but planned to appeal the verdict, which they described as “disappointing and sad.”
“This is a very difficult day for Travis McMichael and Greg McMichael,” Jason Sheffield, one of the lawyers, said, adding that both of them “honestly believe what they were doing was the right thing to do.”
Kevin Gough, a lawyer for Mr. Bryan, said he intended to file a motion for a new trial next week.
Before the verdict, some observers worried that the racial makeup of the jury — which included 11 white people and one Black person — would skew the outcome in the defendants’ favor.
When Judge Timothy R. Walmsley approved the selection of the nearly all-white jury, he noted that there was an appearance of “intentional discrimination” at play, but he said that defense lawyers had given legitimate reasons unrelated to race when they moved to exclude eight Black potential jurors in the final stages of the selection process.
Mr. Arbery’s family said he was out jogging on the day of his death, but defense lawyers said no evidence had emerged to show that Mr. Arbery jogged that day into the defendants’ neighborhood of Satilla Shores, just outside of Brunswick, a small coastal city.
Video footage showed Mr. Arbery, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, walking into a partially built house in the neighborhood shortly before he was killed. It was a house he had walked into numerous times before. Each time, surveillance video showed him wandering around the property, but not taking or damaging anything. The owner of the house told the police that items had been stolen from a boat that was sometimes stored on the property, though he was not sure the boat was there when the thefts occurred.
General concerns about property crime in Satilla Shores were widespread in early 2020, residents testified at the trial.
Travis McMichael told the police that he had seen Mr. Arbery outside the partially built house 12 days before the shooting. During that evening encounter, Mr. McMichael said, Mr. Arbery put his hands in his waistband, as if reaching for a gun. Mr. McMichael called 911. Mr. Arbery ran away.
On the day of the shooting, a neighbor across the street saw Mr. Arbery in the house and called the police. Mr. Arbery left the house soon after, and ran down the street. Gregory McMichael spotted him and, along with his son, jumped into a truck and gave chase. Moments later, the third defendant, Mr. Bryan, began chasing Mr. Arbery as well.
At the trial, defense lawyers sought to show that the men were acting that day out of a “duty and responsibility” to detain a man who they felt they had reasonable grounds to believe was a burglar, as Robert Rubin, a lawyer for Travis McMichael, put it. In her closing argument, Laura D. Hogue, a lawyer for Gregory McMichael, noted that Mr. Arbery had been on the property before and said he had become “a recurring nighttime intruder — and that is frightening, and unsettling.”
Travis McMichael was the only defendant to take the stand. He told the court he took his shotgun out during the pursuit because his U.S. Coast Guard training had taught him that showing a weapon could de-escalate a potentially violent situation.
He testified that he believed he had little choice but to shoot Mr. Arbery once they clashed. “It was obvious that he was attacking me, that if he would have gotten the shotgun from me, then this was a life-or-death situation,” he said. “So I shot.”
In her final arguments, Ms. Dunikoski, the lead prosecutor, pushed back against the idea that an unarmed man running down the street would constitute a threat to three men, two of whom were armed, in a pair of pickup trucks.
The men began their attack on Mr. Arbery, she said, “because he was a Black man running down the street.”
During the trial, influential civil rights leaders including the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson appeared in the public gallery of the courtroom with members of Mr. Arbery’s family. Mr. Gough, the defense lawyer, tried repeatedly to persuade Judge Walmsley to bar “Black pastors” from attending the trial, arguing that their presence was unduly influencing the jury.
The comments caused widespread outrage, culminating with a large demonstration outside the courthouse by activists including Martin Luther King III, son and namesake of the nation’s most revered civil rights leader.
Allen Booker, a city commissioner in Brunswick, took some measure of solace from Wednesday’s verdicts. “I am hopeful — now more than ever — 11 white people could see the evilness of this crime and convict on the clear evidence of wrongdoing.”