LIFE for the three killers. |
On Friday, the three convicted murderers found out their fate. They ended up getting a LIFE sentence for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery.
The father and son and their neighbor were engaging in a confrontation with the Brunswick, Georgia jogger. The murderers accused Arbery of suspicious behavior inside an abandoned home. The son confronted Arbery with a firearm. The two got into a scuffle and the man shot him three times.
The video was filmed by the neighbor and held in their possession until a prosecutor leaked it.
At the time, the Glynn County prosecutor refused to hear the case because she was friends with the shooter's father. It took almost months before the state took the case over and held these criminals accountable. The prosecutor was defeated in an election but is now facing state charges for contempt and negligence of duty.
She is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
The three men convicted in Ahmaud Arbery's murder were sentenced Friday to life in the iron college.
The father and son were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
Their neighbor will have to serve 30 years of his life sentence before he's eligible for parole. The three men, all of whom are White, were convicted in November for the killing of Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, in Georgia in February 2020.
Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley noted how the shooter went after Arbery after his father saw him running in a street and said, "Let's go." The judge said, "Ahmaud Arbery was then hunted down and shot, and he was killed because individuals here in this courtroom took the law into their own hands."
Walmsley said Arbery was chased for roughly five minutes and "gunned down." The judge sat in silence for one minute to give a sense of that amount of time. The shooting was captured on cellphone video, which the jury viewed during the trial.
Justice for Ahmaud. |
"This was a killing," Walmsley said before announcing the sentences recommended by prosecutors. "It was callous, and it occurred — as far as the court is concerned based upon the evidence — because confrontation was being sought."
The county prosecutor at the time refused to take up charges against the men. She was defeated at the ballot and eventually held in criminal contempt.
During Friday's lengthy hearing, the suspects' attorneys asked the judge to give their clients the chance to earn parole, and neighbor's lawyer tried to persuade Walmsley to let the parole board decide when he could be released.
In emotional testimony, Arbery's family asked for the defendants to receive the maximum punishment allowed.
Ahmaud's family got justice. |
"They each have no remorse and do not deserve any leniency," Wanda Cooper-Jones, Arbery's mother, told Walmsley. "This wasn't a case of mistaken identity or mistaken fact. They chose to target my son because they didn't want him in their community. They chose to treat him differently than other people who frequently visited their community, and when they couldn't sufficiently scare him or intimidate him, they killed him."
Cooper-Jones and Marcus Arbery, Arbery's father, were seen crying in the courtroom when the sentences were announced.
During the trial, prosecutors said Arbery was out running when the men chased him through the neighborhood, eventually boxing him in with their trucks before the shooter fired the fatal shots. The defense team argued the men believed Arbery was a burglary suspect and claimed they acted in self defense.
The jurors spent just 10 hours deliberating before finding the shooter guilty on all counts, including malice murder, felony murder and aggravated assault. The shooter and neighbor were not convicted of malice murder, but were found guilty of felony murder and other charges.
The suspects are also facing federal hate crime charges. A separate trial in the federal case is scheduled to begin on February 7.
Earlier this week, the Department of Justice approached Cooper-Jones about a plea deal that would have the suspects spend 30 years in prison if they admit that what they did was motivated by hate, according to Arbery family lawyer S. Lee Merritt.
No comments:
Post a Comment