Before announcing the sentence for the three white men who murdered a black man in Brunswick, Georgia, US Judge Timothy Walmsley urged everyone in the courtroom to remain silent.
To “put in context” how that crime had happened, the magistrate was silent for a minute, “the fraction of time Ahmaud Arbery ran” to try to escape whoever killed him. Arbery, who was exercising when he was pursued, tried to run for five minutes.
In February 2020, the 25-year-old black man was unarmed and killed with a shotgun blast fired by Travis McMichael, 35, who was accompanied by his father, Gregory McMichael, 65, and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, 52. All of them were sentenced this Friday (7) to life imprisonment.
The footage left no doubt that Travis had shot Arbery three times at close range.
For the judge, footage of the episode recorded with a cell phone shows that the scene was “frightening and disturbing” and leaves no doubt that Travis shot three times at close range. It is because of the lack of sensitivity displayed in the records, according to the magistrate’s interpretation, that the McMichaels will not be able to request progression of sentence to probation in 30 years, unlike Bryan.
The three had already been convicted in November and have now received the sentence. At the time, they were found guilty of murder, aggravated bodily harm, false imprisonment and criminal intent.
Lawyers for the McMichaels argued that the murder was justified because it took place after Arbery ran past the family’s garage in a mostly white neighborhood that had seen a wave of robberies. The defendants said they thought the boy might be behind the robberies — there was no evidence of crimes committed by the victim in his frequent runs around the neighborhood.
The defense’s argument was based on a Georgia law, now repealed, that allowed citizens to arrest suspected criminals. This argument was not accepted.
Father and son grabbed their guns and chased Arbery in a pickup truck. Bryan, unarmed, joined the two moments later. He was the one who recorded Travis firing a shotgun at point-blank range. Arbery carried nothing but his running clothes and sneakers. “They chose my son because they didn’t want him in their community,” Wanda Cooper-Jones, Arbery’s mother, said in court on Friday.
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