The American federal justice sentenced to life imprisonment, Monday August 8, two white men, a father and his son, guilty of having chased and killed in 2020 the young black jogger Ahmaud Arbery.
Travis McMichael, 36, and his father, Gregory McMichael, 66, had previously been sentenced to life without the possibility of early release by the state justice of Georgia, where the crime was committed.
The federal judge officiating at this second trial sentenced the two men to life for “racist crime” and denied their request to be transferred to a federal prison for the remainder of their sentence.
“The prosecution by the Department of Justice and the sentences decided by the court today have made it clear that racially motivated crimes have no place in this country”US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
“Protecting civil rights and countering the violence of white supremacy are among the founding goals of the Department of Justice”he added.
Emblem of the Black Lives Matter movement
On February 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was jogging in Brunswick, a coastal town in Georgia, when he was chased by the two men, armed and accompanied by a neighbor. After a few minutes of chase, Travis McMichael had shot the young African-American. Ahmaud Arbery then became an emblem of the Black Lives Matter movement during the major anti-racist protests of 2020.
The third defendant, William Bryan, who participated in the prosecution of Ahmaud Arbery by filming it, had been sentenced at the first trial to life with the possibility of early release after thirty years of imprisonment. His sentence at the federal trial has not yet been pronounced.
This second trial, unlike the first, placed the racist dimension of the murder at the heart of the debates. The prosecution had notably listed the particularly violent racist insults uttered by the three men in the past, in order to account for the state of mind of the defendants when they embarked on the pursuit of Ahmaud Arbery.