By Rich McKay
BRUNSWICK, Ga. (Reuters) – Prosecutors at a federal hate-crimes trial face a challenge in proving that racial animus motivated the three white men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger shot in a mostly white Georgia neighborhood, trial experts said.
After five days of jury selection, the federal trial of Gregory McMichael, 66, his son Travis McMichael, 36, and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, 52, is set to begin in earnest on Monday in the U.S. District Court in the coastal town of Brunswick.
The three men were convicted of murder in a state trial last year and sentenced to life in prison for the February 2020 shotgun slaying of Arbery L1N2U730C, 25.
The jury will decide whether racial bias drove the defendants’ actions as they chased down Arbery, an issue not examined in the first trial.
The men told the state court they were trying to make a citizen’s arrest when they pursued Arbery in trucks through the streets of their neighborhood. The federal prosecutors will try to prove that they chased Arbery because of his race, a hate crime that carries a life sentence.
Prosecutors need to “get into the mindset” of the accused men and show that racial bias drove them, said Ziv Cohen, a trial expert and a professor of forensic psychiatry at Cornell University.
The defense will likely need to show that the men were motivated only to protect their neighborhood, Cohen said.
In their state trial the men claimed they had chased Arbery, a jogging enthusiast, because they thought he was running away after committing a crime, although they had no evidence that he had. Prosecutors in that trial said the men had unfairly jumped to conclusions based on the color of Arbery’s skin.
“The prosecutors have to show the jury that it was bias and that the motive was a crime, while the defense has to deflect that and fall back on the same arguments in the state trial, that they felt their neighborhood was in danger,” Cohen said.
Almost all of the federal court jurors told Judge Lisa Wood they have heard something about the case, but said they were able to set aside any previous knowledge and decide the case based only on the evidence presented in court.
Travis McMichael said at a hearing last month that he was willing to plead guilty to attacking Arbery because of his “race and color” after reaching a plea agreement with prosecutors.
But he changed his mind after Wood rejected that agreement, saying she could not accept it because it bound her to sentencing McMichael to 30 years in federal prison before he was handed back to the state of Georgia to serve out the rest of his life sentence for murder.
She said she needed more information to know whether a 30-year sentence was just, and cited emotional testimony from Arbery’s family.
All three men have pleaded not guilty in the federal trial L1N2U734Z.
It is not clear whether prosecutors plan to introduce evidence that was not introduced in the state trial, such as Travis McMichael’s vanity license plate featuring the battle flag flown by the southern pro-slavery Confederacy during the 1861-1865 Civil War. Today it is viewed by some as a symbol of white supremacism and by others a reminder of their Southern heritage.
The court is scheduled to hear from Special Agent Richard Dial of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, who has previously testified that Bryan told his office that Travis McMichael uttered a racial slur as Arbery lay dying.
(Reporting by Rich McKay in Brunswick, Georgia,; Editing by Ross Colvin and Alistair Bell)
