The white father and son convicted of killing US man Ahmaud Arbery in a fatal shooting after chasing him through a Georgia neighborhood have been sentenced to life in prison for committing a federal hate crime.
A US District Court judge yesterday (night AEST) sentenced Travis McMichael and his father Greg McMichael, 66, in Brunswick.
Gregory McMichael, left, and his son Travis McMichael, have been convicted of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. (Supplied)
In February, a federal jury convicted Greg McMichael, Travis McMichael and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan of violating Arbery’s civil rights, concluding that they had attacked him because he was black.
All three were also found guilty of attempted kidnapping, and the McMichaels were convicted of using weapons in the commission of a violent crime.
The McMichaels armed themselves with guns and used a ute to chase Arbery after the 25-year-old drove past their home on February 23, 2020. Bryan joined the chase in his own ute and recorded cellphone video of Travis McMichael shooting Arbery with a shotgun. .
The McMichaels told police they suspected Arbery of being a burglar. Investigators determined he was unarmed and had committed no crime.
U.S. District Court Judge Lisa Godbey Wood said yesterday that Travis McMichael had received a fair trial.
“And it’s not lost on the court that it was the kind of trial Ahmaud Arbery didn’t get before he was shot and killed,” the judge said.
Ahmaud Arbery was shot while jogging in broad daylight. (Supplied)
Before both sentences, he heard from members of Arbery’s family. His mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said she hears every shot fired at her son every day.
“It’s so unfair, so unfair, so unfair that they killed him while he wasn’t even committing a crime,” he said.
Greg McMichael addressed the Arbery family before he was sentenced, saying their loss was “beyond description”.
“I’m sure my words mean very little to you, but I want to assure you that I never meant for any of this to happen. There was no malice in my heart or my son’s heart that day,” he said.
Travis McMichael declined to address the court, but his attorney, Amy Lee Copeland, said her client had no convictions before Arbery’s murder and had served in the US Coast Guard.
He said a lighter sentence would be more consistent with what defendants on similar charges have received in other cases, noting that the officer who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, received 21 years in prison for violating Floyd’s civil rights, even though he was not charged. targeting Floyd because of his career.
Arbery’s killing became part of a larger national reckoning about racial injustice and the killings of unarmed black people, including Floyd and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky. Those two cases also prompted the Justice Department to file federal charges.
Ahmaud Arbery confronted the McMichaels family, before being shot three times. (Supplied)
“The evidence we presented at trial proved … what so many people felt in their hearts when they saw the video of Ahmaud’s tragic and unnecessary death: This would never have happened if he had been white,” said the prosecutor Christopher Perras before Travis McMichael. he was convicted.
The McMichaels were among three defendants convicted in February of federal hate crimes. Bryan was scheduled for a sentencing hearing later.
A state Superior Court judge sentenced all three men to life in prison in January for Arbery’s murder, and both McMichaels were denied the possibility of parole.
The three defendants remain jailed in coastal Glynn County in the custody of U.S. marshals as they await sentencing following their federal convictions in January.
Because they were charged and convicted of murder for the first time in state court, the protocol would have turned them over to the Georgia Department of Corrections to serve their life sentences in a state prison.
William “Roddie” Bryan will be eligible for parole. (AP)
In court filings last week, both Travis and Greg McMichael asked the judge to divert them to a federal prison, saying they would not be safe in a Georgia prison system that is the subject of a U.S. Department of Justice investigation focused on in the violence among the prisoners.
Copeland said during yesterday’s hearing for Travis McMichael that his client has received hundreds of threats to kill him as soon as he arrives at the state prison and that his photo has been circulated there on illegal phones .
“I am concerned, your honor, that my client is effectively facing a death sentence at the back door,” he said, adding that “retribution and revenge” were not sentencing factors, even for to a defendant who is “publicly reviled.”
Arbery’s father, Marcus Arbery Sr., said Travis McMichael had shown his son no mercy and that he deserved to “rot” in state prison.
“You killed him because he was a black man and you hate black people,” he said.
Wood said he did not have the authority to order the state to relinquish custody of Travis McMichael to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, but he was unwilling to do so in his case either. He also refused to hold Greg McMichael in federal custody.
During the February hate crime trial, prosecutors bolstered their case that Arbery’s killing was racially motivated by showing the jury roughly two dozen text messages and social media posts in which Travis McMichael and Bryan used racist slurs and made disparaging comments about black people.
Defense attorneys for the three men argued that the McMichaels and Bryan did not pursue Arbery because of his race, but instead acted on a serious, if mistaken, suspicion that Arbery had committed crimes in their neighborhood.