Almost two years ago to the day, the young African-American, Ahmaud Arbery, was shot dead by three white men while he was jogging. Already sentenced to life in prison, the three men were found guilty of “racist crime”.
Symbol of the major anti-racist demonstrations of the summer of 2020 in the United States, the murder of jogger Ahmaud Arbery, 25-year-old African-American, resurfaced on February 22. The three white Americans, already convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison, were found guilty of “racist crimes” by a federal jury.
Travis McMichael, 36, his father Gregory McMichael, 66, and their neighbor William Bryan, 52, had previously been sentenced to life in prison by the state of Georgia. But during this first judgment, the racist dimension of the murder had only been mentioned. “Hate-motivated crime” in the United States refers to an act directed against a person targeted because of certain characteristics of their identity.
Following the announcement of the verdict, Ahmaud Arbery’s family walked out of court raising their hands in the air in victory. “It’s been a long and trying battle,” said Ahmaud Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones.
Shocking racial slurs
During the trial, the prosecution 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 the jogger . According to the prosecutor, the McMichael son had, for example, described African-Americans as “criminals”, “monkeys”, “savages and sub-humans”.
Ahmaud Arbery “was lynched for jogging while being black,” family lawyer Ben Crump, who had also defended relatives of George Floyd, an African-American who died of asphyxiation, told reporters on Tuesday. the knee of a white policeman. The deliberations of the jury, made up of eight white people, three black people and one Hispanic, lasted less than a day.
–
