Jury selection has begun for the trial of Gregory and Travis McMichael and William "Roddie" Bryan Jr., the three white men accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed twenty-five year old African American man in February 2020, outside of Brunswick, Georgia. The three face multiple charges including malice and felony murder. According to the Georgia State Legal Code, a conviction for malice murder requires murderous intent or forethought. A conviction on the charge of felony murder means the murder was committed, whether intentionally or not, during the course of another crime. The penalty for both crimes can be death, imprisonment for life without parole, or imprisonment for life with the possibility of parole.
The defense is expected to argue that the assault on Ahmaud Arbery was legitimate under Georgia’s Citizens Arrest law, which was applicable at the time, and that Arbery’s death was caused by his physical resistance to a legal action and was therefore self-defense on the part of the three white men.
Arbery was jogging on a rural road when the armed white men approached him in two vehicles. They claim his behavior was suspicious, but they had not witnessed any criminal behavior on his part, nor had they notified the police prior to stopping him, which should negate a Citizen’s Arrest defense, unless of course, jogging while Black is itself legal grounds for a Black man to be stopped by white vigilantes. Without the claim of Citizen’s Arrest, the three men were simply assaulting Arbery, and he was the one to legitimately defend himself, not them. A thousand potential jurors from Glynn County in coastal Georgia were summoned for questioning by defense and prosecution attorneys. It remains to be seen whether a Georgia panel that includes white jurors will convict three white men of murdering an African American.
The Georgia Citizen’s Arrest law, which was repealed in May 2021, dated to 1863 during the American Civil War. Its last iteration, passed by the Georgia legislature in 2010 and signed into law, stated “A private person may arrest an offender if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge. If the offense is a felony and the offender is escaping or attempting to escape, a private person may arrest him upon reasonable and probable grounds of suspicion.” A private individual who makes a “citizen’s arrest” is instructed “without any unnecessary delay” to “take the person arrested before a judicial officer . . . or deliver the person and all effects removed from him to a peace officer of this state.” Nearly every state in the United States currently permits citizen arrests in one form or another.