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From Vox
Lawyers left racism out of the trial over Ahmaud Arbery’s death. Here’s why. -
People react outside the Glynn County Courthouse in Brunswick, Georgia, on November 24, following guilty verdicts for the defendants in the trial of the killers of Ahmaud Arbery. Greg McMichael, his son Travis McMichael, and a neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan were found guilty of murder in the February 2020 fatal shooting of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery. | Sean Rayford/Getty Images
Prosecutors made no mention of the slain 25-year-old’s race until the very end of the trial.
From the moment video footage of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder went viral on social media in May 2020, many viewers labeled it a lynching.
They concluded that racial animus guided Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael, and William “Roddie” Bryan to pursue Arbery and shoot him without cause. For many who saw the video, that a Black man who was jogging down the street in the middle of the day was then cornered and shot dead by three white men unquestionably constituted a lynching motivated by the color of Arbery’s skin as he traveled through a mostly white suburb of Georgia.
There were other glaring elements. Bryan, who recorded the fatal encounter, told authorities that Travis McMichael, who pulled the trigger, called Arbery a racial slur after firing. One of the pickup trucks that the men used to chase Arbery featured a vanity license plate of the old Georgia state flag. The flag, flown from 1956 to 2001, prominently displayed the Confederate battle flag, which has come to be a symbol of the Lost Cause ideology that falsely holds the Civil War was not fought over slavery.
Systemic issues of racism loomed large over the case, too. The men were arrested 74 days after murdering Arbery, only after video of the shooting was leaked and went viral, and following days of protests.
Why did the arrests take so long? critics wondered. Body camera footage from the first responding officer on the scene on February 23, 2020, showed the officer tending to Travis McMichael, telling him to “take a breath” and to be careful not to get blood on himself after shooting Arbery dead. The white officer seemed to empathizewith him. “Do what you need to do,” “I can only imagine,” and, “You got anyone we can call for you?” the officer said to Travis McMichael. The treatment was reminiscent of the officers who purchased a Burger King meal for an avowed white supremacist just after he murdered nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. Why did these white men who committed heinous acts against Black people get gentle handling from the police?
But despite all the racial issues that surrounded the core facts of the case, skin color hardly came up during this month’s trial of the three men who were convicted on Wednesday of Arbery’s murder. It wasn’t until the closing argument that prosecutor Linda Dunikoski mentioned Arbery’s race. The McMichaels and Bryan, she said, felt entitled to chase Arbery down “because he was a Black man running down the street.”
Legal experts and activists who spoke to Vox said the avoidance of addressing race in the trial was strategic. The question before prosecutors was stark: “Play it safe” by not offending a nearly all-white jury with talk of race and racism, or take a risk by addressing the elephant in the room.
“The prosecutors walked a thin line in trying to persuade jurors. They’re in the Deep South, so a Confederate flag in a juror’s mind, superficially, may not equate to racism or white supremacy. If you cross that line, you’ve lost them,” said Tiffany Jeffers, a professor of law and legal practice at Georgetown University Law Center.
But some experts argued that the prosecutors’ choice not to mention race in front of a nearly all-white jury suggests that progress on racial justice has been marginal.
“A lot of people in our country adhere to the myth of colorblindness. They think to talk about race makes you racist, so they’re afraid to talk about race. The whitewashing of this trial needs to be addressed,” Justin Hansford, a professor at the Howard University School of Law, said.
The defense used racial tropes while the prosecution evaded race
Prosecutors originally signaled that they planned to introduce race-related evidence during the trial to help jurors see racism as a motive for the three men. The evidence included a Facebook post by Travis McMichael referencing Johnny Rebel, the 1960s-era white supremacist singer who made racist music riddled with the n-word; racist text messages from Bryan’s cellphone; and an “Identity Dixie” Facebook post by Gregory McMichael, according to the New York Times. Before the trial, the defense tried to exclude the Confederate emblem vanity plate from the trial but the judge permitted it, though the prosecution never brought it up to the jurors. In fact, none of these details were presented to the jury.
While the prosecutors didn’t rely on the claim of racism, race entered the trial in other ways.
One defense attorney insisted that Black pastors and leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton not sit inside the courtroom since they would supposedly intimidate the jurors. “We don’t want any more Black pastors coming in here … sitting with the victim’s family, trying to influence the jurors in this case,” defense attorney Kevin Gough told the judge. Gough later apologized.
Stephen B. Morton, Pool/Getty Images
From left, Ahmaud Arbery’s mother Wanda Cooper-Jones, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Arbery’s father Marcus Arbery, and civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump react after the jury convicted Travis McMichael on November 24 in the Glynn County Courthouse in Brunswick, Georgia.
The defense team also invoked race through a series of dog whistles about Arbery’s hygiene and appearance, though they never mentioned the color of Arbery’s skin or that of his murderers.
“Turning Ahmaud Arbery into a victim after the choices that he made does not reflect the reality of what brought Ahmaud Arbery to Satilla Shores in his khaki shorts with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails,” defense attorney Laura Hogue told the jury in closing remarks.
Legal experts and activists following the trial blasted Hogue’s rhetoric. Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump claimed Hogue’s description likened Arbery to a “runaway slave” and ludicrously suggested that the men had the right to “chase him and make him comply or kill him.”
Defense attorneys blended these racist tropes with arguments about the three men needing to patrol Satilla Shores to keep residents and property in the suburban neighborhood safe.
The makeup of the jury forced race to loom even larger in the trial before it began. Eleven jurors were white and one was Black in a county that is 27 percent Black.
“The [nearly all-white makeup of the jury] was completely intentional. The judge noted it but didn’t rule on it,” said Jeffers. “You expect juries to resemble the communities they are representing.”
The Sixth Amendment guarantees a right to a criminal trial by an impartial jury, but there is no law that states a jury needs to be racially representative of the area where it takes place. Lead prosecutor Dunikoski claimed the defense disproportionately struck qualified Black jurors and based some of their strikes on race. Though the jury convicted the men of murder, there’s ample reason to question the decision to strike almost all Black jurors from the start, experts told Vox.
“Whiteness is a race. It’s an ideology, and there is bias associated with it, but we don’t have those discussions,” Jeffers said. “All of the burden is shifted onto Blackness and any potential bias Black people have because of their race. But no one talks about the potential bias of white jurors.”
While the verdict in the trial was widely hailed by civil rights leaders, many experts who spoke to Vox signaled that the country still has not grappled with racism and how it infiltrates many facets of American life.
“All these trials seem to be happening at once, and these conversations aren’t going away,” Hansford said, adding that the trial only made the need for teaching subjects like critical race theory more urgent. “It taught me how they can try to use these racial tropes like talking about someone’s ‘dirty toenails’ to win freedom for defendants,” he said.
Why you don’t hear about the ozone layer anymore -
Click to watch some good news about the environment.
In the ’80s, scientists discovered there was a hole in the ozone over the South Pole. A significant layer of gas that deflects much of the sun’s radiation was disappearing much faster than anyone expected. Projections suggested it would collapse by 2050, increasing skin cancer rates, harming crops, and destroying the marine food chain. The situation was dire. But today, we are on the path to recovery.
Dr. Susan Solomon, among other scientists, contributed key findings to understand what was depleting the ozone layer and how to address it. In this video she takes us back to her expedition to Antarctica, breaks down how we managed to fix this huge problem, and looks at our next big environmental challenge — climate change — with the unbridled optimism that drove her to fix the ozone hole.
The significance of the guilty verdicts in Arbery’s murder -
Ahmaud Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, leaves the Glynn County Courthouse in Brunswick, Georgia, as jury deliberations begin in the trial of the killers of her son, 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, pictured in the poster at left. | Sean Rayford/Getty Images
The three white men who shot the 25-year-old Black man dead won’t walk free.
After deliberating for roughly 11 hours, a jury in Georgia has found three men — Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael, and William “Roddie” Bryan Jr. — guilty in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery.
Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was out for a run on the outskirts of Brunswick, Georgia, when the three white men cornered him with their vehicles and shot him dead. Video footage of the murder was viewed by millions of people in May 2020, sparking a widespread outcry about America’s disregard for Black life. The men pursued and shot Arbery in February 2020; the guilty verdict was nearly two years in the making.
Though the widely circulated video of the encounter shows most of what transpired when the men chased Arbery, the outcome of the trial was far from clear at the start.
One defendant, Travis McMichael, who shot Ahmaud Arbery, was found guilty of the first and most serious count of the indictment, malice murder, and eight other felony charges. William Bryan and Gregory McMichael received split verdicts. They were found guilty on counts of felony murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and criminal attempt to commit a felony.
Octavio Jones/Getty Images
From left, defendants William “Roddie” Bryan, Travis McMichael, and Gregory McMichael, shown during their trial at the Glynn County Courthouse in Brunswick, Georgia.
Arbery became an avatar of the Black Lives Matter movement after his death, and the verdict is a significant moment in the struggle to receive justice for slain Black Americans. Still, the decision comes at a time when many activists believe social justice progress is being undone by laws that seek to restrict voting rights access or limit the scope of American history that’s taught in schools, while the Covid-19 pandemic continues to disproportionately affect historically underserved communities.
The verdict may come as a surprise, given that many activists and experts say the legal system tends to favor white men who claim self-defense: The defendants argued their actions fell under a Georgia citizen’s arrest law, created during the slavery era, that has since been repealed.
“What was at stake in this trial was reframing what and who we believe the rule of law will protect and is meant to protect — whether that is white supremacist ideology or the standard of true justice,” said Tiffany Jeffers, a professor of law and legal practice at Georgetown University Law Center. “This verdict hopefully quells white supremacist ideology and tells those individuals that [violence] is unacceptable.”
Whether the verdict changes behavior or not, Arbery’s death has already led to legal reform in Georgia,including the passage of a hate crimes law as well as the gutting of a slavery-era citizen’s arrest lawthat the men used to defend their killing. These changes could eventually ripple across the country. But most states still have these laws in effect, giving citizens and vigilantes what some legal scholars say is undue power to act on their worst biases.
“I am glad that Georgia has already taken these steps, but it all depends on what ultimately happens because we can still have people administering the laws in ways that are racist,” said Justin Hansford, a professor at the Howard University School of Law.
With viral video and questions about the role of race in policing and vigilantism, the high-profile trial of the three men was similar to that of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer found guilty of murdering George Floyd. It also took place during the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who was found not guilty of homicide on the grounds of self-defense after fatally shooting two people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and wounding another during social justice protests in the summer of
The trial also had echoes ofthe case of George Zimmerman, who in 2012 shot Florida teenager Trayvon Martin dead and was found not guilty of murder and manslaughter after claiming self-defense. That case and the verdict inspired the Black Lives Matter movement, and the trial against the three Georgia men, eight years later, is viewed as a test of how much progress the country has made.
In a statement released Wednesday, President Joe Biden said that Arbery’s murder “is a devastating reminder of how far we have to go in the fight for racial justice in this country.”
Yet the prosecution didn’t mention race until its closing argument. The three men pursued Arbery “because he was a Black man running down the street,” a prosecutor said. Lawyers’ reluctance to introduce the case’s racial element mirrors America’slingering unwillingness to confront racism.
Stephen B. Morton/Getty Images
The prosecution plays a video of the fatal encounter between Ahmaud Arbery and the McMichaels at the request of the jury in deliberation on November 24.
Though the Black Lives Matter movement has changed the way America talks about social justice — in 2020, more Americans than in 2015 said that racial discrimination is a big problem — the strong backlash against it continues to slow advancement.
“While we’ve made strides, the tenets of the Black Lives Matter movement have not been realized,” Jeffers said. “For people who support the movement, it’s frustrating to see it being used as a slogan when this is about life and death for people. There’s dissonance between the strides we’ve made and how far we have to go, and the fact that it almost feels like we’re right back at the beginning when we were having conversations about Trayvon’s murder.”
The McMichaels and Bryan trial and verdict, briefly explained
Prosecutors in the trial argued that Gregory McMichael, 65, his son Travis, 35, and neighbor William Bryan, 52, pursued Ahmaud Arbery based on false assumptions about why he was jogging in Georgia’s Satilla Shores neighborhood. The prosecution argued that the men could not claim self-defense since they were the initial aggressors.
Defense attorneys argued that the three men were making a lawful citizen’s arrest, which was protected at the time under a since-repealed Georgia statute. Under the law, a person could “arrest an offender if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge.”
The defense team then argued that the younger McMichael shot Arbery because Arbery attacked him. Georgia law at the time allowed someone to stand their ground and use reasonable force to defend themselves or others. But the force is unjustified if the person is the initial aggressor and if they’re committing or attempting to commit a felony against a person.
Octavio Jones/Getty Images
<figcaption>Prosecutors Paul Camarillo and Linda Dunikoski stand in the courtroom at the Glynn County Courthouse
on November 22.
The prosecution pointed out that under the citizen’s arrest law, the men could only carry out an arrest if they witnessed a crime take place or had “immediate knowledge” that a crime had been committed. The men had not seen Arbery commit a crime, nor did they have knowledge that he did, a fact that was not disputed in the trial.
The prosecution argued in its closing statement that the men felt emboldened to go after Arbery, acting on gossip from the community Facebook group about thefts in the neighborhood. “The defendants assumed the worst about Mr. Arbery and made their driveway decisions,” prosecutor Linda Dunikoski said.
Though the prosecutors initially signaled that they might argue that the men were motivated by racial animus, they left out this context, choosing not to center the racial tensions of the case. Details like that there was a Confederate flag sticker on the McMichaels’ truck toolbox or that Travis McMichael apparently said a racial slurafter shooting Arbery did not enter the courtroom.
“The prosecutors walked a thin line in trying to persuade jurors. They’re in the Deep South. So a Confederate flag in a juror’s mind, superficially, may not equate to racism or white supremacy. If you cross that line, you’ve lost them,” Jeffers said. “Prosecutors tried to make their case by using neutral arguments that are based in logic and reason. You don’t want to pull on the race heartstrings because you don’t know if it’s going to be effective with all members of the jurors. If it turns one off, then it backfires.”
The defense made a final play to paint Arbery as “not an innocent man,” as someone who was to blame for “running away instead of facing the consequences.” According to defense attorney Laura Hogue’s comments at trial, Arbery shouldn’t be seen as a victim since “the choices he made does not reflect the reality of what brought Ahmaud Arbery to Satilla Shores in khaki shorts, with no socks to cover his long dirty toenails,” even alluding to Arbery’s criminal record, which a judge ruled was inadmissible.
“With these statements, the defense was trying to argue that there was some reasonable basis for the suspicion they had. Some of the jurors could have had the same suspicions,” Hansford said. “But they were basing this in bias. It’s not illegal to run down the street with uncut toenails.”
Sean Rayford/Getty Images
Defense attorney Laura Hogue speaks during the trial of the killers of Ahmaud Arbery on November 18.
Nevertheless, the jurors — 11 white and one Black — decided the men had no grounds to try to detain Arbery and kill him in the process. The men will face hate crimes charges in federal court in February, with a federal indictment claiming that they attempted to seize and intimidate Arbery because of his race and skin color.
Georgia instituted reform in the wake of Arbery’s murder — but it’s not enough
In June 2020, just months after the men murdered Arbery, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed a hate crimes bill into law. The law imposes additional penalties for crimes committed due to a victim’s perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender, mental disability, or physical disability.
A felony conviction under the Georgia law could render a sentence of at least two years of imprisonment and a fine of no more than $5,000. A misdemeanor conviction could result in a sentence of six to 12 months of imprisonment and a $5,000 maximum fine. Before Kemp signed the measure, Georgia was one of four states that didn’t have a hate crime law on the books.
Georgia also made changes to its citizen’s arrest law, becoming one of the first states to repeal it. The Civil War-era legislation, initially used as a “slave-catching law,” was pared back to only allow citizen’s arrests in specific situations, like a business owner detaining a shoplifter or a restaurant owner detaining a dine-and-dasher.
“I want to be supportive and feel encouraged when legislatures repeal racist and biased laws. It’s a good thing, but I’m really looking at what manifests as a result of repealing the law,” Jeffers said. “If you still have bad policing, overpolicing, and overuse of force in Black communities, then repealing a citizen’s arrest law is of no effect. We need outcome-based results versus reactionary legislation.”
Kemp said in a statement released Wednesday that “Arbery was a victim of a vigilantism that has no place in Georgia,” and added that he hoped the case could lead his state “forward down a path of healing and reconciliation.”
Others say that as states look to change laws, officials need to think more about the other ways that racist violence impacts people’s lives, including mental health. During the trial, Arbery’s mother walked out after listening to the defense attorney try to sully her son’s character and introduce suspicion about his intentions during the final moments of his life.
“These families are traumatized by this violence but the government hasn’t provided anything, like financial support, for their healing,” Hansford said. “Is the conviction supposed to heal Arbery’s mother? She needs support.”
Update, 3:30 pm: This story was updated to include statements from President Biden and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.
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From Jokes Subreddit
I think, I’m going to lose my drivers license and all just because of a stupid police officer… -
The conversation went like this, when I got pulled over in my car:
Officer: “License and registration, please, I think you are drunk!”
Me: “I assure you, I did not drink anything.”
Officer: “Ok, let’s do a little test! Imagine driving in the dark on a highway at night, when you see two lights in the distance. What is this?”
Me: “A car.”
Officer:“Of course! But which one? A Mercedes, an Audi or a Ford?”
Me:“I have no idea!”
Officer:“So, you’re drunk.”
Me:“But I didn’t drink anything.”
Officer:"Okay, one more test – Imagine, you drive in the dark on a highway at night, and there is one light coming at you.What is it?
Me:“A motorcycle.”
Officer:“Of course! But which one? A Honda, a Kawasaki or a Harley?”
Me:“I have no idea!”
Officer:“As I suspected, you’re drunk!”
Then I started to get annoyed and asked a counter question.
Me:“So…, counter question – You’re driving in the dark on a highway at night and see a woman on the roadside. She wears a mini skirt, fishnet stockings, high heeled shoes and only a bra as a top. What is this?”
Officer:“A prostitute of course.”
Me:“Yes, but which one? Your daughter, your wife or your mother?”
Things went downhill from there and now I have a court date to attend…
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