Trial of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery: the three white defendants convicted
The three white Americans charged with the murder of African-American jogger Ahmaud Arbery are found guilty.
© Sean Rayford GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / AFP
Text by: RFI Follow
2 min
After a month of trial marked by the issue of racism in the United States, three white men were found guilty of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in the small town of Brunswick, Georgia in February 2020. The 25-year-old African-American was shot dead while jogging in their neighborhood.
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With our correspondent in Miami,
David Thomson
The defendants invoked self-defense in the name of a law authorizing the arrest of citizens in Georgia.
This law, dating from 1863, was once used to hunt runaway slaves.
Their defense did not convince the jury, which however had
only one black
.
When these three white men chased Ahmaud Arbery behind the wheel of their pickup, the 25-year-old African-American was just jogging.
And the latter was unarmed when he was shot dead after an altercation.
At the statement of the guilty verdict on all the charges including that of murder, Ahmaud Arbery's mother is overwhelmed by emotion: “
I thought that day would never come.
Now Ahmaud can rest in peace.
"
A nationwide trial
In this racist and segregated southern state, it took more than two months for the three murderers to be arrested after the video of the murder was broadcast by their own lawyer.
The latter thus believed to exonerate his clients.
These images had instead horrified America and fueled the anti-racist demonstrations of the summer of 2020. Sign of the importance of this trial, President Joe Biden immediately welcomed the verdict while recalling that there is still "a
lot of work
”to achieve equality in the United States.
Nothing can bring Mr. Arbery back to his family and to his community, but the verdict ensures that those who committed this horrible crime will be punished.
https://t.co/WK7vNZlZfj
- President Biden (@POTUS) November 24, 2021
Their sentence will be announced in the coming weeks, but the three men have not finished with justice.
They will be tried a second time at the federal level for "
racist crime
" in February 2022.
►
To read also: In the United States, Kyle Rittenhouse, the gunman of Kenosha, acquitted
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