The US federal justice sentenced this Monday to life in prison two white men, a father and his son, guilty of having persecuted and murdered the young black runner Ahmaud Arbery in 2020.
Travis McMichael, 36, and his father, Gregory McMichael, 66, had previously been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of early release by the Georgia state justice system, where the crime was committed.
The federal judge who presided over this second trial sentenced the two men to life in prison for a “racist crime” and denied their request to be transferred to federal prison for the remainder of their sentence.
An emblem of the Black Lives Matter movement
On February 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was running in Brunswick, a coastal city in Georgia, when he was chased by the two men accompanied by a neighbor, armed and in two pickup trucks. After a few minutes of pursuit, Travis McMichael shot the young African-American man.
Ahmaud Arbery later became an emblem of the Black Lives Matter movement during the major anti-racism protests of 2020.
The third accused, William Bryan, who participated in the persecution of Ahmaud Arbery by filming it, had been sentenced in the first trial to life imprisonment with the possibility of early release after 30 years in prison. His sentence in the federal trial has not yet been pronounced.
This second trial, unlike the first, placed the racist dimension of the murder at the center of the debates. The prosecution had listed in particular the especially violent racist insults uttered by the three men in the past, with the aim of accounting for the state of mind of the accused when they embarked on the persecution of Ahmaud Arbery.
Source: BFM TV
