Three men to go on trial in jogger Ahmaud Arbery’s murder

Three white men will go on trial Monday in the US state of Georgia for the fatal shooting of a Black jogger last year. Gregory McMichael, 65, his son Travis, 35, and their neighbor William Bryan, 52, have been charged with murder and aggravated assault for shooting 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery in February 2020.

Gregory, a retired police officer, and Travis followed Arbery in a pickup truck, while Bryan filmed the scene from his vehicle. After an altercation, Travis opened fire and killed Arbery.

The three men say they mistook Arbery for a burglar and invoked a Georgia law allowing ordinary citizens to make arrests.

Fleeing Black man shot in back of neck by police: Family

Local prosecutors did not make any arrests for nearly three months in the case that was eventually transferred to state police.

Arbery became one of the symbols of the Black Lives Matter protests that followed over his killing and George Floyd‘s murder in Minneapolis.

“A Black man should be able to jog without fearing for his life,” President Joe Biden tweeted on the anniversary of Arbery’s death.

 North Carolina man killed in an ‘officer-involved shooting’

The defendants are then to plead self-defense, arguing that Arbery was resisting lawful arrest, according to news agency AFP.

Prosecutors will argue that the victim was unarmed and that nothing links him to a series of burglaries that took place in the neighborhood where he was jogging.

Since Arbery’s death, Georgia has passed a law that imposes additional penalties for crimes motivated by hatred toward a victim’s race, gender, sexual orientation and other characteristics.

The southern US state also repealed its citizen’s arrest law in May.

“Today we are replacing this Civil War-era law, ripe for abuse, with language that balances the safety and right of self-defense to person and property with our shared responsibility to root out injustice and set our state on a better path forward,” the Republican governor Brian Kemp had said at the time.