Three white Americans convicted of persecuting and killing African-American two years ago Amad Arbery who did jogging, was found guilty yesterday, Tuesday, for “racist crime”.
Travis McMichael, 36, Gregory McMichael’s father, 65, and their neighbor William Bryan, 52, were sentenced last year to life in prison for Arbery’s murder in a Georgia court.
But this first trial did not address the racist dimension of the crime, which was at the heart of this second trial before a federal court.
Shortly after the announcement of the decision, Arbery’s family came out of court and made the victory sign with their own hands.
“We have achieved justice for Amad,” Marcus Arbery’s father told reporters.
“It was a long and difficult battle,” added Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones. “We achieved a victory today, but there are many families who have not succeeded,” he said.
During the trial, Arbery’s family lawyers referred to the particularly violent racist insults the three men had expressed in the past. According to the prosecutor, Travis McMichael, for example, had described the African-Americans as “criminals” and “monkeys”, “savages and subhumans”.
The jury consisted of eight whites, three blacks and one Hispanic and met for less than a day before reaching its decision.
Emblematic form
Amad Arbery “fell victim to lynching because he was black and jogged,” the Ben Crump family’s lawyer, who also represented the family of George Floyd, who died of suffocation when he was arrested by white police, told reporters yesterday.
“I believe this is the first federal federal conviction in the state of Georgia for a hate crime,” he added.
“Crime of racist hatred” is defined in the USA as a crime committed against someone because of his specific characteristics.
Two years ago, on February 23, 2020, Amad Arbery, 25, was jogging in Brunswick, Georgia, when he was chased by three gunmen in a van. Minutes later, Travis McMichael killed him.
For more than two months, the police had not made any arrests and a video of the incident, which went viral on the internet, had to be published in order to launch an investigation.
Arbery has become an iconic figure in the Black Lives Matter movement during major anti-racism protests in 2020.
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