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    Justice prevailed in the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers. In America, that’s a shock | Moustafa Bayoumi

    Justice prevailed in the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers. In America, that’s a shockMoustafa BayoumiThe jury reached the right verdict – even as the criminal justice system did everything it could to exonerate the three men It’s shocking that Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan were found guilty of murdering Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia. Yet the shock doesn’t stem out of any miscarriage of justice. On the contrary, the jury in Glynn county deliberated and reached the correct decision. Stalking an innocent Black man, chasing him, cornering him, and then killing him must come with criminal consequences in this country, and each of the three murderers now faces the possibility of a life sentence.But the shock is that justice was served in a case where it seemed the criminal justice system and substantial portions of media coverage were doing all they could to exonerate these men. In fact, everything about this case illustrates how difficult it is to get justice for Black people in this country, starting with how often Fox News and other media outlets referred to the case as “the Arbery trial”, as if Ahmaud Arbery were the perpetrator here and not the victim.Kyle Rittenhouse wasn’t convicted because, in America, white reasoning rules | Michael HarriotRead moreThe facts of the case have never been in dispute, and yet they were also often distorted or ignored to aid the defense. The McMichaels claimed they were trying to make a citizen’s arrest of Arbery, an avid athlete who had been out jogging a mere three miles from his home that day. Father and son McMichael found Arbery suspicious, they told police, because there had been “several break-ins in the neighborhood”. This statement has been repeated so often in the last year that it has assumed the status of fact.And yet, according to the local Brunswick News, there had been just one burglary reported to county police between 1 January and 23 February 2020, the day of Arbery’s murder. That singular incident referred to property taken from a Satilla Shores vehicle – Travis McMichael’s truck. (McMichael reported a theft because, after he left his truck unlocked, his gun had been taken, he said at trial.) While surveillance video also captured an unidentified white couple possibly taking some property belonging to Larry English, a man building a home in the area, English testified that nothing had been stolen from the construction site of his second home, where Arbery stopped directly before being chased by the McMichaels. And during the trial, we heard that in all of 2019, there had been only four reported car break-ins. So, yeah, hardly a runaway crime spree.Then why did it keep getting reported this way?There’s more, of course. It took almost three months for the Georgia bureau of investigation, which took over the case, to arrest Travis and Gregory McMichael. (Bryan was arrested months later.) The elder McMichael had been a police officer and investigator for the district attorney’s office. The favoritism shown the men ran deep, so deep that the Brunswick district attorney, Jackie Johnson, who first oversaw the case, was later indicted on charges of violating her oath as a public officer and obstructing a police officer, as she was accused of “showing favor and affection to Greg McMichael during the investigation”, according to the indictment.Like Johnson, the next prosecutor, George E Barnhill, was also forced to recuse himself from the case. His son had previously worked with McMichael in what again was a clear conflict of interest. Barnhill wrote a letter to the police department explaining his recusal. “It appears Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael, and Bryan William [sic] were following, in ‘hot pursuit’, a burglary suspect, with solid first-hand probable cause, in their neighborhood,” he wrote. We now know just how completely and utterly false this account of events was. By the time the trial began, jury selection was also looking highly problematic. The population of Glynn county is over a quarter Black, and yet the seated jury for the trial was overwhelmingly white, with only one Black juror selected. Even the judge acknowledged the appearance of “intentional discrimination” in this outcome, as defense attorneys struck virtually every Black potential juror from serving on the jury.Defense attorneys also used every tool at their disposal to dehumanize Ahmaud Arbery. Laura Hogue, lawyer for Greg McMichael, characterized Arbery as a “recurring night-time intruder” whose presence was “frightening and unsettling”, as if adopting every stereotype of “the dangerous young Black man” she could find. It got even worse when she told the jury that Arbery had “long, dirty toenails”.What a morally bankrupt and shameless statement, but such are the lengths that this system will go to preserve its ill-gotten power. Any honest student of the history of this country will recognize what was happening in this case and in this trial. On display was nothing short of an American fear in all its guises.First, there is the irrational and racist fear of Black people that has motivated so much white vigilantism. It’s no mere coincidence that Georgia’s (now-defunct) self-defense statute dates to the civil war era. As Carol Anderson, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and many others have shown, the violence at the heart of the American system begins with a fundamental fear of Black and Indigenous people.Then there’s the establishment’s fear that its power will be exposed for what it too often is, a precarious system that serves and protects not the public but its own interests through its prejudices and favoritisms. And finally, there’s the fear that those who don’t look like us will stand in judgment. Thus a system of power built on racial hierarchy will seek its own self-preservation.The good news, heard in the courtroom, is that the rest of us are not afraid. The mostly white jury was not afraid to return the proper verdict. The assistant district attorney Linda Dunikoski was not afraid (and was completely convincing) in her prosecution. The attorney S Lee Merritt was fearless and eloquent in his advocacy for justice. But the bravest, most fearless, most admirable person in this saga has to be Wanda Cooper-Jones, Arbery’s mother.It’s hard to believe that justice would have prevailed here were it not for Cooper-Jones’ indefatigable efforts to push and challenge prosecutors like Johnson and Barnhill and the whole damn system at every turn. She pushed Georgia’s legislature to pass a hate crimes bill. She filed the federal lawsuit against the men now convicted of killing her son. She even met with the then president Donald Trump to discuss police reform.Cooper-Jones is a real hero, both for her son and in the fight for a truly just society. She was willing and able to fight a system that, if the past be a guide, was more than willing to exonerate itself.But here’s the problem: what happens when there is no Cooper-Jones? Why should our rights depend on grieving mothers fighting for the rights of their murdered children? What kind of justice system is that?I’m thankful that people like Wanda Cooper-Jones exist, but what we really need is more than that. We need a justice system that isn’t afraid of power. We need a justice system that isn’t afraid of doing what’s right. What we really need is a justice system that doesn’t depend on grieving mothers at all.
    Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York
    TopicsAhmaud ArberyOpinionUS justice systemGeorgiaRaceUS politicscommentReuse this content More

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    This is justice of a kind. But don’t forget Ahmaud Arbery’s killers almost got away | Akin Olla

    This is justice of a kind. But don’t forget Ahmaud Arbery’s killers almost got awayAkin OllaThe verdict is welcome, but it rings hollow given the underlying systems of white supremacy that have long justified the vigilante actions of Arbery’s attackers The three white men who hunted down Ahmaud Arbery in a neighborhood in Glynn county, Georgia, have been found guilty in court. The US held its breath as the jury deliberations entered their second day this Wednesday. Travis McMichael, who fired the shots that killed the 25-year-old Black man, his father, Greg, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan were all convicted of the 23 February 2020 murder. While the verdict is a welcome one, it rings somewhat hollow given the recent not guilty verdict in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse and the underlying systems of white supremacy that have long justified the vigilante actions of Arbery’s attackers.How the murder of Ahmaud Arbery further exposes America’s broken and racist legal systemRead moreDespite the trial’s outcome, the actual process of the case was steeped in various justifications of the killers’ actions, from the racially-tinged fearmongering of the defense attorneys to the fact that the killers were arrested 74 days after Arbery’s murder. Justice cannot be served as long as the current system remains, and it seems unlikely that even this verdict will dissuade future vigilantes.A defense attorney must, of course, make the best case for their client. It speaks volumes about our country that much of what could be mustered during this trial were attempts to attack Arbery as a person – a tactic commonly deployed to justify the murders of Black Americans. The judge dismissed attempts by the defense to introduce prior acts by Arbery into evidence, and a move to include the fact that trace amounts of THC were found in his system when he was killed. After those failed efforts, the defense moved to disparage the young man’s body, telling jurors that Arbery had “long, dirty toenails”, and criticizing the shorts that he wore the day he was shot – as if Arbery had called this crime on to himself for the way he dressed; as if the McMichaels and Bryan were aware of anything about him before they decided to chase him down and execute him; as if it was Arbery’s toenails that caused Travis McMichael to exclaim “fucking nigger” above the dying man.Though many of the defense’s attempts to use racist dog-whistles were defeated in pre-trial decisions by the presiding judge, they were still successful in ensuring that the jury would be nearly all white, despite the county itself being about 27% Black. This effort is not uncommon among attorneys and is seeped in a larger system of racism that leads to underrepresentation of people of color on juries.There were many others who participated in the process of justifying the vigilante behavior of the father-and-son duo and their neighbor, who captured it all on video. The police who arrived at the scene took the word of the murderers and did not place them under arrest. The officer accepted their story of self-defense, that these men were simply defending the neighborhood from a Black burglar. Greg Michael had, luckily for their little lynch mob, served as a county police officer for seven years and 30 as an investigator for the local district attorney’s office. The same district attorney’s office was later accused by county commissioners of preventing the arrests of the killers. According to Allen Booker, commissioner: “The police at the scene went to [district attorney Jackie Johnson], saying they were ready to arrest both of them … [s]he shut them down to protect her friend McMichael.” The district attorney shifted blame to police and claimed that they could have used their own discretion to make the arrest.After the video of Arbery’s death went viral and fueled protests demanding action, it still took two months for police to arrest his killers. This bias in favor of police officers and former police officers is all too common in the US, and definitely not rare in Glynn county, known for allegations of officers being shielded from consequences.While crimes like this allow us to focus on the individual white vigilantes, it is important to zoom out and see the many others – from the defense, to the district attorney, to the arresting officers and the institutions they influence and control – who are implicated. Arbery’s murder was of a pattern with a history. It is rooted in the segregation and violent racism that shaped the borders of towns and countries across the US. It is rooted in the legacies of the mobs that killed 14-year-old Emmett Till and overthrew the government of Wilmington, North Carolina, in a white supremacist coup. It is also reflected in other modern examples, like the “Karens” who unleash police officers onto their Black neighbors, or Rittenhouse, who was recently found not guilty of a crime not so different from that committed by the McMichaels and Bryan.Like Rittenhouse, this was a case of white Americans taking up arms to protect what they perceived as Black threats against property. Although the people whom Rittenhouse shot were white, he chose to arm himself during an uprising following the shooting of a Black man, and it is difficult to believe that stereotypes about violent Black looters and killers did not play a role in his perceptions of the uprising – the same kinds of stereotypes that fueled the attack on Arbery.Much like Rittenhouse’s case, the defense lawyers of Arbery’s three assailants claimed their clients engaged in self-defense. Despite showing up to the scene with weapons, Rittenhouse and the men who killed Arbery thought they were the ones under threat. The verdict against the McMichaels and Bryan may feel like a victory, but Rittenhouse’s verdict has done more than enough to justify future vigilantism by white men deeply fearful that somewhere out there Black people might be disrupting the status quo.The verdict here matters for the family. Arbery’s father, Marcus Arbery, reacted to the verdict saying: “We conquered that lynch mob.” This case exposed the various layers of the justice system that work in tandem to justify murders committed by white men on a political mission. But justice cannot be truly served until this entire system is ripped down and built anew. Rittenhouse’s claims of protecting property are already being used by the defense attorney of a member of the far-right Proud Boys group. And despite the scrutiny the Proud Boys received for participating in the 6 January riot in Washington DC, the organization has begun showing up at rightwing marches and protests claiming to be there for security purposes.While the desire to celebrate the Arbery verdict is understandable, the decision will not stop white men from murdering Black people and others they deem to be a threat to property or the political order. It will take a movement to do that, a movement that will have to overcome the violence of white vigilantes and an entire system held up by their atrocities.
    Akin Olla is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian
    TopicsAhmaud ArberyOpinionRaceUS politicsGeorgiacommentReuse this content More