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Three white men who killed a young black man after chasing him because they suspected he was a thief They were sentenced this Friday to life imprisonment, in a case that brought to light judicial tension in the racial lawsuits in the United States.
Travis McMichael, 35, the perpetrator of the fatal shootings, and his father, Gregory McMichael, 66, were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of early release.
His neighbor William Bryan, 52, who participated in the persecution by recording it, was sentenced to the same sentence but may apply for parole after 30 years in prison.
Ahmaud Arbery went out “for a run and ended up running for his life,” said Judge Timothy Walmsley when he pronounced the sentence in Brunswick, a coastal city in the southeastern part of the state.
On November 24, they were convicted of murder after debates marked by the issue of racism and the right to self-defense. Before the Brunswick court issued the penalties, Arbery’s parents asked for the maximum penalty.
The three men “targeted my son because they didn’t want him in their neighborhood,” said the mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones. On February 23, 2020, the 25-year-old was running in Brunswick when the three men chased him in their vehicles.
After an altercation, Travis McMichael opened fire and killed Arbery, who was trying to grab the rifle. He claimed to have acted in self-defense. The defendants claimed that they mistook Ahmaud Arbery for a thief, after having seen him days before entering a house under construction. They also invoked a law that allowed citizens to arrest a suspect in Georgia.
In this state still heavily marked by racism and segregation, the three men benefited from the leniency of the local prosecutor’s office – for whom Gregory McMichael worked for a long time – who released them.
The three men were arrested after the state police took over the case following the broadcast in May of the video on the young man’s death. “Self defense always ends badly”, prosecutor Linda Dunikoski stressed, noting that the McMichaels had shown “no remorse or empathy.”
Robert Rubin, an attorney for Travis McMichael, said his client “thought he was doing the right thing, but he wasn’t.” Arbery “was trying to get away from these strangers who were yelling at him, threatening to kill him,” prosecutor Dunikoski told the court. And then they killed him. “This is not the Wild West,” he added. Ben Crump, a lawyer for Arbery’s father, called the three men a “lynch mob.”
US President Joe Biden said in November that the Arbery assassination “is a devastating reminder of how far you have to go in the world. fight for racial justice in this country”.
In the summer of 2020, protesters chanted Ahmaud Arbery’s name during anti-racist protests that rocked the country following the death of George Floyd, an African-American who was killed by the pressure of a white policeman’s knee on his neck.
www.abc.es
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism