Maybe Take the Win?

 Down in Georgia, two of the three men convicted in the Ahmaud Arbery killing were willing to plead guilty to federal hate crime charges, if the plea deal included serving their life sentences in federal, not Georgia state, prison.  The victim's mother nixed the deal. She wants the nation to hear the racial slurs the men used before and after the killing, allegedly captured in texts and online messages.  She wants them to serve time in the more violent state prisons, news reports say.

Here's why that might not be such a good idea, nevermind if you think putting the nation through another racial reckoning is a good thing, whether the country needs to debate, again, why her son died:

“It’s not just proving that they’re racists, and not just proving that they killed Ahmaud Arbery without justification,” Page Pate, a Georgia lawyer and legal analyst, said. “It’s proving that their racism is the reason they killed Ahmaud Arbery.”

Here we go again, then.  

Also, the federal jury pool will be drawn from across the state.  Here in Minnesota, that means a mostly white juror pool for the police officers on trial for assisting Derek Chauvin in killing George Floyd.  There's a time out for Covid, which is again spreading rapidly here.  But the three convictions are not a sure thing, and the jurors are mostly white.

IN Georgia, I suspect the state-wide juror pool too might be more conservative than those selected for the first trial.  Ahmaud's mom made the decision though.  Nobody talked to her, apparently, or told her it might not be the wisest move to make.

So bring on another trial then. And the consequences too.  Not sure if America is ready for all this again.   ... “It’s proving that their racism is the reason they killed Ahmaud Arbery.”

ADDED:  in the next trial, the rules of evidence will be different according to the judge's pre-trial rulings.  If the men are defending their lives based on being racists, surely the judge will let into this trial the interactions between the men, prior to the killings?

Greg McMichael worked as a detective investigating on the earlier conviction cases of Ahmaud Arbery for carrying a weapon into a school basketball game, and for stealing and fleeing a local store with goods.  He was known to the man who allegedly saw him running through his neighborhood where things had been reported stolen according to social media neighborhood posts, and where his own son had a gun stolen earlier from a vehicle.

My guess is, black or white, they were going after that young man, hoping to stop him, as he had been reported previously for entering the abandoned home, police called and looked for him in the neighborhood, but to no avail.

The new trial likely will include these details, along with the racial slurs.  The defendants likely will testify at this trial, and state they were concerned with a robber not a black man in the neighborhood.  Travis McMichael will likely testify had a white man charged the shotgun, he would have fired at him too.

Racism is a horrible thing, but putting people in jail for crimes they did not convict is part of that too.  The first trial omitted a lot of relevant evidence that might have influenced how jurors though.  Much easier to convict a person of murder if you think they were out gunning for blacks, rather than protecting the neighborhood that day and then their own lives when the gun might have been turned on them...

Remember George Zimmerman?  With the rising crime rates of late, I would not be surprised if you find a juror in Georgia who might see the McMichaels and senior's law enforcement skills especially, as relevant in what happened the day Ahmaud Arbery was killed.  Racism is complex, as is crime patrolling and the legal rules that the McMichaels were operating under that day re. citizens' arrests.  The law has since been changed.  To trial we go...