Three white men who killed Ahmaud Arbery ask court to overturn their hate crime convictions – Essence

The three white men who killed Ahmaud Arbery are fighting to have their hate crime convictions overturned.

In 2020, Gregory McMichael and his son Travis McMichael, together with neighbor William Bryan, chased Arbery in pickup trucks through a Georgia housing project before one in all them shot him. The three “were found guilty of murder by a Georgia state court in November 2021. They were sentenced to life in prison. After a federal trial, they were found guilty of hate crimes and other charges in February 2022.” NBC News reports.

The federal hate crimes trial focused heavily on racial bias, one in all the motives prosecutors “largely avoided” throughout the state’s case. This is because hate crimes are notoriously difficult to convict due to burden of proof on the prosecutor to “prove, in part, that the alleged perpetrator acted out of prejudice against the race, religion, sexual orientation or other characteristic of the victim.”

Attorneys for the McMichaels and Bryan have asked for Court of appeal to overturn their federal hate crime convictions, arguing that “their past racist comments do not demonstrate a racist intent to harm a 25-year-old black man.”

ON Wednesday“[a] A panel of judges from the eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta” heard oral arguments within the case from lawyers for Arbery’s killers.

Prosecutors filed legal summary before Wednesday’s arguments, which read partly: “As to the defendants’ reasons for pursuing, entrapment, and ultimately killing Arbery, the evidence presented at trial established that they had a long-standing hatred of and prejudice against black people and a concurrent support for lynching.”

This evidence involved men making “racist comments online and in text messages, often using racial slurs and inciting racial violence.”

However, “McMichaels’ attorneys argued that the comments did not prove they murdered Arbery because he was black, and Bryan’s attorney, J. Pete Theodocion, even said that including the messages in the trial had a ‘prejudicial effect’ on the jury,” according to the report. Independent.

Even in the event that they win an appeal to overturn their hate crime convictions, the three men will still have to spend the remainder of their lives in prison because they’re “already serving life sentences” for Arbery’s crimes. murder.