Three white Americans were sentenced to life in prison on Friday for chasing and then shooting a young black jogger, Ahmaud Arbery, who they said they suspected was a burglar in February 2020 in Georgia, in the southern United States. .
Travis McMichael, 35 and perpetrator of the fatal shots, and his father Gregory McMichael, 66, were given life sentences without the possibility of early release. Their neighbor William Bryan, 52, who participated in the prosecution by filming it, was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of requesting early release after 30 years in prison.
Ahmaud Arbery went out “to jog and he ended up running for his life,” Judge Timothy Walmsley said as he delivered sentence in Brunswick, a coastal town in the southeastern part of the state.
“They didn’t want my son in their neighborhood,” said his mother
The three men were convicted of murder on November 24, after debates marked by the issue of racism and the right to self-defense.
Before the judge, the family of Ahmaud Arbery had asked Friday morning a “maximum punishment”.
They “took aim at my son because they didn’t want him in their neighborhood,” said Ahmaud Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones.
The lawyers for the three men pleaded one last time an unintentional act which did not deserve imprisonment until death.
The shooter had pleaded self-defense
On February 23, 2020, the 25-year-old was jogging in Brunswick when he was chased by the three men in their cars.
After an altercation, Travis McMichael opened fire and killed the jogger who was trying to grab his rifle. He claimed to have acted in self-defense.
The defendants had assured to have taken Ahmaud Arbery for a burglar, after seeing him a few days before entering a house under construction. They also invoked an old law that allows ordinary citizens to arrest a suspect in Georgia.
Clemency of the local prosecutor’s services
In this state still deeply marked by racism and segregation, the three men had benefited from the leniency of the services of the local prosecutor, for whom Gregory McMichael had long worked, who had left them free.
It had taken the release in May of the video filming the death of the young African-American for the investigation to be entrusted to the state police and for the three men to be arrested.
Ahmaud Arbery’s name was chanted in the major anti-racist protests that rocked the country in the summer of 2020, after the death of George Floyd, an African-American killed by a white police officer.