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Attorneys are asking a U.S. appeals court to throw out the hate crime convictions of three White men who used pickup trucks to chase Ahmaud Arbery through the streets of a Georgia subdivision before one of them killed the running Black man with a shotgun.
A panel of judges from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta was scheduled to hear oral arguments Wednesday in a case that followed a national outcry over Arbery’s death. The men’s lawyers argue that evidence of past racist comments they made didn’t prove a racist intent to harm.
On Feb. 23, 2020, father and son Greg and Travis McMichael armed themselves with guns and drove in pursuit of Arbery after spotting the 25-year-old man running in their neighborhood outside the port city of Brunswick. A neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, joined the chase in his own truck and recorded cellphone video of Travis McMichael shooting Arbery in the street.
More than two months passed without arrests, until Bryan’s graphic video of the killing leaked online and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case from local police. Charges soon followed.
All three men were convicted of murder in a Georgia state court in late 2021. After a second trial in early 2022 in federal court, a jury found the trio guilty of hate crimes and attempted kidnapping, concluding the men targeted Arbery because he was Black.
In legal briefs filed ahead of their appeals court arguments, lawyers for Greg McMichael and Bryan cited prosecutors’ use of more than two dozen social media posts and text messages, as well as witness testimony, that showed all three men using racist slurs or otherwise disparaging Black people. The slurs often included the use of the N-word and other derogatory terms for Black people, according to an FBI witness who examined the men’s social media pages. The men had also advocated for violence against Black people, the witness said.
Bryan’s attorney, Pete Theodocion, said Bryan’s past racist statements inflamed the trial jury while failing to prove that Arbery was pursued because of his race. Instead, Arbery was chased because the three men mistakenly suspected he was a fleeing criminal, according to A.J. Balbo, Greg McMichael’s lawyer.
Greg McMichael initiated the chase when Arbery ran past his home, saying he recognized the young Black man from security camera videos that in prior months showed him entering a neighboring home under construction. None of the videos showed him stealing, and Arbery was unarmed and had no stolen property when he was killed.
Prosecutors said in written briefs that the trial evidence showed “longstanding hate and prejudice toward Black people” influenced the defendants’ assumptions that Arbery was committing crimes.
“All three of these defendants did everything they did based on assumptions — not on fact, not on evidence, on assumptions. They make decisions in their driveways based on those assumptions that took a young man’s life,” prosecutor Linda Dunikoski said in court in November 2021.
In Travis McMichael’s appeal, attorney Amy Lee Copeland didn’t dispute the jury’s finding that he was motivated by racism. The social media evidence included a 2018 Facebook comment Travis McMichael made on a video of Black man playing a prank on a white person. He used an expletive and a racial slur after he wrote wrote: “I’d kill that …. .”
Instead, Copeland based her appeal on legal technicalities. She said that prosecutors failed to prove the streets of the Satilla Shores subdivision where Arbery was killed were public roads, as stated in the indictment used to charge the men.
Copeland cited records of a 1958 meeting of Glynn County commissioners in which they rejected taking ownership of the streets from the subdivision’s developer. At the trial, prosecutors relied on service request records and testimony from a county official to show the streets have been maintained by the county government.
Attorneys for the trio also made technical arguments for overturning their attempted kidnapping convictions. Prosecutors said the charge fit because the men used pickup trucks to cut off Arbery’s escape from the neighborhood.
Defense attorneys said the charge was improper because their clients weren’t trying to capture Arbery for ransom or some other benefit, and the trucks weren’t used as an “instrumentality of interstate commerce.” Both are required elements for attempted kidnapping to be a federal crime.
Prosecutors said other federal appellate circuits have ruled that any automobile used in a kidnapping qualifies as an instrument of interstate commerce. And they said the benefit the men sought was “to fulfill their personal desires to carry out vigilante justice.”
The trial judge sentenced both McMichaels to life in prison for their hate crime convictions, plus additional time — 10 years for Travis McMichael and seven years for his father — for brandishing guns while committing violent crimes. Bryan received a lighter hate crime sentence of 35 years in prison, in part because he wasn’t armed and preserved the cellphone video that became crucial evidence.
All three also got 20 years in prison for attempted kidnapping, but the judge ordered that time to overlap with their hate crime sentences.
If the U.S. appeals court overturns any of their federal convictions, both McMichaels and Bryan would remain in prison. All three are serving life sentences in Georgia state prisons for murder, and have motions for new state trials pending before a judge.
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The family of a missing Georgia woman is pleading for help after her vehicle was found torched and in pieces near Atlanta.
Imani Roberson, a mother of four young children, was last seen July 16 in Conyers, about 24 miles southeast of Atlanta, the Rockdale County Sheriff’s Office said.
She vanished following a dinner at her mother’s home, her family and Sheriff Eric Levett said at a news conference on Wednesday.
Roberson’s mother, Clarine Andujar-White, said she last saw her daughter on July 16 for a family meal. Roberson left her mother’s house around 5:30 p.m. with two of her children, ages 3 and 1 month, according to the sheriff. Andujar-White said they were headed back to Roberson’s home.
The other two children, 11 and 9, stayed at the grandmother’s house, according to Levett.
The following day, Andujar-White called her daughter repeatedly but she did not answer, Levett said. Andujar-White went by Roberson’s home and found no one there, according to the sheriff. Andujar-White filed a missing person’s report on July 17.
All four of Roberson’s children are safe, the sheriff told reporters declining to provide further details about their whereabouts.
“I will leave that up to the family to clarify that,” he said.
Authorities obtained a search warrant for the home Roberson shared with her children and husband, the sheriff said. Information led them to South Fulton County, where Roberson’s burned out vehicle was found.
Images provided by Roberson’s family to NBC News affiliate WXIA in Atlanta appear to show charred pieces of the white Mazda SUV still littering the site where the vehicle was found. And video from a neighbor’s doorbell camera, also provided by her family to WXIA, appears to show the vehicle pulling out of Roberson’s driveway the evening she went missing.
The sheriff’s office is asking the public to contact them if they believe they have any information that could help with the investigation.
“There are children that need their mother and we are going to continue to search and investigate this case until we find Imani,” Sheriff Levett said Wednesday. “I have assured the family that we are going to find her daughter.”
Andujar-White said she knows her daughter “would never leave her children or myself.”
“Imani loves her children,” she said at the news conference. “Please help me reunite these babies with their mother.”
NBC News has reached out to the family for comment.
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