Defendants in Ahmaud Arbery case say slavery-era law enabled them to shoot

By: Stacy M. Brown In Georgia, defense attorneys are making the case that the three white men involved in killing Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man, were justified by a Civil War-era law instituted to catch runaway slaves. Travis McMichael, 35, his father, Gregory McMichael, 65, and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan, 52, plans to defend their actions by claiming they were making a citizens’ arrest that went awry only after Arbery resisted. When the trio killed Arbery on February 23, 2020, Georgia law allowed almost anyone to arrest another citizen if “they had reasonable and probable grounds of suspicion” that a suspect had committed a felony. The state overturned the statute after Arbery’s murder. Lawmakers introduced and passed the original code in 1863 to capture slaves who had escaped from plantations in the South. “They are going to use this law because it wasn’t repealed until after Ahmaud Arbery was killed by the McMichael family, and I am not sure we’re going to have the justice that we should,” said Shirley James, publisher of the Savannah Tribune in Georgia. James said Georgia also employs the Stand-Your-Ground law that allows citizens to use deadly force when confronted with life-or-death situations. “The thing that happens a lot, even with George Floyd and a lot of our African Americans who have been unjustly murdered, the victim becomes the criminal,” James remarked. “They are looking at Arbery’s life and he’s deceased and can’t defend himself.” She added that very few people of color are among the 1,000 prospective jurors, and Glynn County, where the trial will occur, counts as a mostly white area. “I don’t think in that county that you will find the kind of objectivity that you need,” James demurred. “When you think of the mindset of the things going on now with people so free to speak out in reference to their discriminatory attitudes, they have about us …” Recent reports suggest that many U.S. states still have laws that allow for citizens to make arrests. Chris Slobogin, a law professor at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University, told Reuters News Service that citizen’s […]

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