Like many people, I followed the Kyle Rittenhouse trial out of Kenosha, Wisconsin fairly closely over the past several weeks. As discussed in Jane’s post on Sunday, that trial proved to be a riveting instance of a totally false and racialized progressive narrative (“white supremacist vigilante crossed state lines with illegal firearm to go on shooting spree against innocent mostly peaceful BLM protesters”) getting completely contradicted by incontestable facts (mostly videos) introduced in evidence at the trial.
But following the Rittenhouse trial has inherently meant little time left to follow another high-profile trial unfolding simultaneously in Brunswick, Georgia — the trial of Gregory and Travis McMichael and Roddy Bryan for the alleged murder of Ahmaud Arbery in February 2020.
Having not devoted much attention to the Arbery matter before now, my brain was of course, as is inevitable, heavily infected with the official progressive narrative of the situation. Here that narrative goes something like this: “innocent unarmed black recreational jogger in white neighborhood hunted down and murdered by white supremacist vigilantes for doing nothing more than ‘jogging while black.’”
With the verdict in the Rittenhouse case in, I’ve now had time to catch up on the Arbery matter. There is an extensive trial record, as well as closing arguments, all of which can be watched on video. And of course, learning the facts has proved yet again that essentially everything, or at least everything important, about the official progressive narrative is false.
That does not necessarily mean that Arbery’s accused murderers will be acquitted. Their claim of self-defense is, for reasons discussed below, somewhat weaker than that of Rittenhouse. As of this writing, the jury has just begun its deliberations. However, before reading up on the facts my sense had been that this was an open-and-shut case against the defendants. Now I would say that they have at least a 50/50 chance of acquittal.
Where might I have ingested the official progressive narrative in the Arbery matter? Well, here is the New York Times article from November 9, shortly after the November 5 start of the trial, headlined “What We Know About the Shooting Death of Ahmaud Arbery.” Excerpt:
Mr. Arbery, 25, was a former high school football standout who was living with his mother outside the small city of Brunswick. He had spent a little time in college but seemed to be in a period of drift in his 20s, testing out various careers, working on his rapping skills and living with his mother. . . . He was shot dead in a suburban neighborhood called Satilla Shores. Friends and family said he liked to stay in good shape, and he was an avid jogger who was often seen running in and around his neighborhood. On Sunday, Feb. 23, 2020, shortly after 1 p.m., he was killed in that neighborhood after being confronted by a white man and his son. . . . Mr. Arbery was running in Satilla Shores when a man standing in his front yard saw him go by, according to a police report. The man, Gregory McMichael, said he thought Mr. Arbery looked like a man suspected in several break-ins in the area. . . .
The Times itself doesn’t use the phrase “jogging while black” in that particular piece, substituting instead the patronizing “friends and family said he liked to stay in good shape and . . . was an avid jogger.” However, you can’t look very far for articles about this case in the media without finding that phrase everywhere. Examples: The Conversation, May 7, 2020, “The killing of Ahmaud Arbery highlights the danger of jogging while black.”; The Undefeated, May 8, 2020, “Running while black: Ahmaud Arbery’s killing reveals runners’ shared fears of profiling.” Or there was the Times’s own collection on May 18, 2020 of responses to its “request to readers” to “share their experiences of ‘running while black.’” One could accurately look at this last one as a very intentional effort to divert readers’ attention away from the actual facts of the Arbery case.
To understand the Times’s key deception, the important background to know is that prior to the incident the neighborhood in question, known as Satilla Shores (just outside Brunswick, Georgia) had been plagued by a string of burglaries. The repeated burglaries had particularly affected a certain property that was a home belonging to a guy named English, that was under construction, and therefore not attended in the evening and not completely secured from intruders. To deal with the burglaries, including at this particular property, the neighborhood had started a “neighborhood watch” program. Separately, English had installed several security cameras at his property.
The key deception in the Times’s November 9 piece is the line that defendant Greg McMichael “said he thought that Mr. Arbery looked like a man suspected in several break-ins in the area.” That line is very carefully calculated to give the impression that Greg McMichael was wrongfully racially profiling Mr. Arbery, based only on Mr. Arbery’s race, and without reasonable grounds for suspicion that Mr. Arbery had committed a crime. Mr. McMichael may well have uttered the quoted statement at some point. But the truth is that by November 9 it was absolutely clear that Mr. Arbery not only “looked like” a suspect, but was absolutely known to have been the very person who was wrongfully in the English house on multiple occasions. The security cameras at the English house had captured Arbery illegally entering this property at least five times, between October 25, 2019 and February 23, 2020. Greg McMichael’s son Travis — another defendant in the case and the one who actually pulled the trigger on the shot that killed Arbery — had observed Arbery with his own eyes entering the under-construction house. The video footage from the English house security cameras was shown to the jury, and also compiled as a collection of stills into a trial exhibit, that can be found in the Daily Mail coverage of the trial here on November 11.
The quality of the pictures is not great, but there is no question that it is Arbery. From a summary at Legal Insurrection of the closing argument on behalf of Greg McMichael, given by lawyer Laura Hogue:
She noted that it was incontestable that it was Ahmaud Arbery returning night after night, repeatedly caught on camera, at the same time thousands of dollars worth of property was disappearing. Did we have a picture of Arbery walking off with the property? No. But the only reasonable inference of someone skulking around another person’s home at night, with valuable property found missing the next day, is that the person skulking was plundering that property, and engaged in felony burglary under Georgia law.
A video of the full closing argument is available at the link.
The reason that the defendants in this case have a less-clear self-defense case than did Rittenhouse is that Rittenhouse had been pursued and attacked by the people he killed in self-defense. By contrast, the two McMichaels and Bryan pursued Arbery, after Greg McMichaels had observed Arbery running from the English house. Thus this case involves not just a pure claim of self-defense, but also requires that the defendants have been justified in pursuing and attempting to detain Mr. Arbery. That justification is good, but not completely open-and-shut. The defendants assert that they were entitled to pursue and detain Arbery under a Georgia “citizen’s arrest” statute. Here is the full text of that statute (via Law of Self Defense):
“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.”
So the issues for the jury are whether Arbery was “escaping or attempting to escape,” and whether the defendants had “reasonable and probable grounds for suspicion” that a felony had been committed. In considering how the facts bear on these issues, keep in mind that the crime of felony burglary in Georgia does not require that you actually took anything on this particular occasion of unlawful entry.
I’ll leave it to the jury to make the decision on whether the McMichaels and Bryan were justified in their conduct. But however the result comes out, the narrative of “innocent recreational jogger murdered for ‘jogging while black’” is and always was completely false. Arbery absolutely did enter the English house illegally on multiple occasions, and Ms. Hogue is completely right that the only reasonable inference is that he was the one stealing the property that repeatedly went missing. Shame on me for reading the New York Times and uncritically thinking there might be some truth to what they were reporting.
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