It is clear from Tex McIver’s reckless behavior—from firing at a car full of teenagers in 1990, to shooting recklessly at a bird in a heavily populated area, to finally whipping out his revolver and killing his wife in 2016—that he had a distorted view of himself as an honorable vigilante, a bizarre sort of private law enforcement officer, a throwback to the good old days of slave patrols and Southern honor.
Acting as a lone-ranging citizen, Tex was ready to shoot not only when he was in actual mortal danger, but when he was annoyed or irritated by behavior that he unilaterally regarded as unacceptable. Tex had his own peculiarly violent way of making America great. Given the combination of his Blue Lives Matter and we-don’t-call-911 signs, the tens of guns he owned, the gun-slinger’s paraphernalia littered around his ranch, and his friendship with the local sheriff, it is also likely that Tex imagined that such brash behavior would win the beaming approval of those officially charged with enforcing the law.
Experience has shown that Tex is not alone in holding this self-righteous view of himself as a privileged enforcer of law and order. And, in fact, organizations like the neighborhood watch that cost Trayvon Martin his life in Florida, and legal institutions like the “citizen’s arrest” have perpetuated many of the race-based premises of the American system of slave control. “Although slave patrols officially ceased to operate at the close of the Civil War, their functions were assumed by other Southern institutions . . . their lawless violent aspects were taken up by vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan.”[1]
The distorted lens of racial perception plays a prominent role in many cases in which such enforcers presume to take action. News media regularly report instances when white private citizens butt in and call the cops on legal and perfectly normal behavior by black persons. These are but the visible cases among many more that occur without public notice. A few notable incidents include the case of a white woman in Manhattan who called police after a black man out bird watching in Central Park asked her to leash her dog, as park rules required. “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life,” the white woman told him, pulling out her cellphone and dialing 911.[2] A professor at Ball State University in Indiana called the police after a black student refused to change his classroom seat. The student was charging his computer and preferred to stay where he was.[3] A bank in Detroit called the police on a black man who was trying to deposit checks he had received in settlement of a discrimination lawsuit he had brought against a former employer. The authenticity of the checks could easily have been verified, but bank officials instead acted on their suspicions of attempted wrongdoing by a black man.[4] The president of a white homeowners’ association in a gated community in Oklahoma blocked a black deliveryman’s truck and called the police. The customer who had taken the delivery eventually came out and “defused” the situation.[5]
At a more overtly dangerous level, it is becoming increasingly common for heavily armed private Americans to confront other Americans who displease them, not only for allegedly breaking the law, but for expressing contrary political or cultural views, as in peaceful demonstrations, and even for daring to act as elected legislators.[6]
The police are the main, but not the only, means of criminal law enforcement in the United States. There is a spectrum of auxiliary private actors and actions in the gray areas of criminal procedure. These are aimed, at least in principle, at helping to prevent crime and apprehend lawbreakers. (Wild cards like Tex McIver have no legitimate place within that range of actors, but nonetheless pop up with distressing frequency.) The spectrum ranges from the merchant who restrains a shoplifter or resists a holdup with lethal force; to the private citizen who decides to intervene in what they perceive to be an ongoing crime; to patrols of private groups, such as neighborhood watches and unofficial border militia; to armed private security guards licensed by state and local authorities. Although the law might endorse the actions of these auxiliary actors in some specific circumstances, much of the legal territory is uncharted or vague. With the rise of formal police agencies, legislators and judges have devoted themselves to writing laws and rendering judgments that empower or regulate police and their actions. Private actors have been left to navigate murky doctrines from ancient common law, getting involved at their own risk. The tensions of race and racial perceptions are unrestrained along most of this spectrum.
The practice of ordinary citizens taking it upon themselves to arrest other ordinary citizens is a particularly dangerous point on the violent margins of race and the American criminal justice system.[7] The citizen’s arrest is made outside of an extensive body of law that constrains sworn law enforcement officers—the prior restraint of procedure, such as arrest warrants, and the bounds of doctrine, such as reasonable suspicion and probable cause. The vigilante lurks in the shadow of the citizen’s arrest. The lens through which racial differences are viewed is for all practical purposes unrestrained and uncorrected in these private confrontations.
“In theory, [the citizen’s arrest] makes sense,” University of South Carolina Law Professor Seth W. Stoughton wrote. “Public safety is everyone’s responsibility, after all. In practice, however, citizen’s arrest doctrines have set the stage for tragic, unnecessary and avoidable confrontations and deaths.” Private arrest authority, Stoughton continued, “is too often badly misused by those who believe their higher social status gives them authority over someone they perceive as having lower status. Frequently, this falls along racial lines.”[8]
“It can get messy. . . . A citizen who is being arrested is much less inclined to be cooperative if it’s not somebody with a blue uniform on,” Ronald L. Carlson, a law professor at the University of Georgia, told the New York Times.[9] The resistance of the person being arrested escalates the confrontation and invites fatal results.
Different from arrest by sworn law enforcement officers, the idea of the citizen’s arrest in Anglo-American law goes back to the Statute of Winchester, enacted in 1285 under King Edward I of England. The statute established more regular criminal procedures in England than existed under the earlier common law because, “robberies, murders, and arsons be more often used than they have been heretofore.”[10] Felons often went free under the old arrest procedures because local citizens were reluctant to indict miscreants for various reasons, including favoring their neighbors over strangers who were victims of these neighbors’ crimes. Henceforth, the statute declared, citizens would be punished for failing to go after criminals. They were required to raise a “hue and cry,” to arouse neighbors to chase and apprehend felons, and had a duty to join the chase.
Before the establishment of regular police forces in the American colonies, citizen’s arrests and the hue and cry were common. Today, most states and the District of Columbia either have citizen’s arrest laws on the books or allow them to be made under common law doctrine.[11] In many states, including Georgia, a private person is allowed to make a citizen’s arrest only when a felony has been committed in their presence.[12] In general, a citizen may use deadly force only when the criminal actually committed a “dangerous felony,” including murder, manslaughter, mayhem, kidnapping, arson, burglary of a dwelling, robbery, forcible sodomy, and forcible rape.[13] A private person who uses deadly force acts at their peril—if it turns out that no dangerous felony was committed, the arresting citizen is liable to criminal prosecution and payment of damages in civil law.[14]
Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law was enacted in 1863 specifically to help masters control their slave population.
Georgian units in the Confederate army were primarily stationed in Virginia. The Union army was preparing to invade the state from Tennessee. Enslaved Africans were fleeing plantations to join Union forces. . . . With its criminal justice system in a state of collapse, the 1863 code revision empowered white Georgians to replace law enforcement and slave patrols to keep the enslaved Black population under control.[15]
In more recent times, the concept of the citizen’s arrest in Georgia has gone from being featured approvingly in a profile of “one man’s little stand against crime” in Atlanta’s newspaper in 1989, to calls for its repeal (and the repeal of similar laws or abolishment of common law doctrine in other states) in 2020.[16] A cook who intervened and prevented a carjacking at the Midtown Promenade shopping center in 1989 was praised as a “good Samaritan” and won an Atlanta police meritorious service award.[17] But in subsequent years several other attempted citizen’s arrests resulted in criminal charges against the would-be law enforcers. In 2000 a man chased down four teenagers he suspected of having earlier broken into his home. He forced them into his Jeep at gunpoint and took them back to his house. He was subsequently charged with the felony of false imprisonment.[18] Two housemates were convicted of misdemeanor battery after they grabbed at gunpoint two boys they claimed were attempting to break into their home. The men tied the boys up, drenched them with a water hose, slapped them, and threatened worse. A jury declined to convict the men of the more serious charge of kidnapping.[19]
When such encounters involve black or brown “suspects” seen through the racial lens of white enforcers, anecdotal experience shows that the chances of a deadly outcome are great.
At about 6:00 p.m. on the evening of May 7, 2019, a twenty-one-year-old white woman named Hannah Payne was sitting in her black Jeep Cherokee near an intersection of two major roadways just south of Atlanta’s airport. Payne had a Georgia Weapons Carry License, popularly known as a concealed carry permit.[20] A handgun was in a holster strapped to her side.[21] Hannah’s mother Margaret Payne later explained why her daughter was packing a handgun that day.
“Just everyday protection, you know, the society we live in,” she explained with unconscious irony. “You hear about it every day on the news. Innocent people getting shot, innocent people are getting broken into. She travels around Atlanta with her job. It’s just personal protection and everybody has the right to do that.”[22]
As Hannah waited in traffic, she saw a red 2002 Dodge Dakota pickup truck run a red light and strike a tractor-trailer truck. The driver of the pickup was Kenneth Herring, a sixty-two-year-old black man. No one was hurt. The accident caused no serious damage.
A Georgia state corrections officer also witnessed the accident and spoke to Herring, according to the testimony of Detective Keon Hayward. Payne called the 911 emergency line to report the accident. Herring got out of his truck and remained at the accident scene for about twenty minutes. During this period he appeared to be disoriented. He walked around his truck several times and repeatedly asked, “What happened? Who hit me? What’s going on?”
There was no evidence that Herring was intoxicated or under the influence of drugs. Based on his experience working in a prison infirmary, the corrections officer thought that Herring was having a “medical emergency,” specifically that he was experiencing “diabetic shock,” a lay term for hypoglycemia, a condition in which one’s blood sugar is lower than normal. Among the symptoms of hypoglycemia are “Confusion, abnormal behavior, or both, such as the inability to complete routine tasks.”[23] Studies have shown that “driving performance is affected adversely by moderate hypoglycemia, causing problems such as inappropriate speeding or braking, ignoring road signs and traffic lights and not keeping to traffic lanes.”[24] Concerned about Herring’s medical condition and his agitation, the corrections officer suggested that Herring sit back down in his pickup truck. Herring got into his truck. He then unexpectedly started driving away from the scene.
Payne was on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, who instructed her to stay at the scene and specifically told her not to follow Herring. Police were on the way, the dispatcher said, and it would be safer for Hannah if she remained at the scene. But Payne insisted on chasing after Herring, staying on the line with the dispatcher, who repeatedly told her to break off the chase.
Payne eventually caught up with Herring, roughly one mile away. At about 6:20 p.m. she blocked his truck with her jeep. Rush hour traffic was heavy, and Herring could neither back up nor go around Payne’s Jeep. Payne would later claim that Herring bumped into her Jeep with his truck. But police said that at no point during the entire incident did the two vehicles come into contact. According to four witnesses, Payne got out of her Jeep and walked back to Herring’s truck. At some point, she drew her gun from its holster. Because she was still on the line with the dispatcher, what Hannah Payne said to Kenneth Herring was recorded, as well as being heard by some of the witnesses.
“Get out of the car, get out of the fucking car!” Payne is reported to have shouted at Herring. “Get out of the fucking car.” Some witnesses claimed that Payne also said, “I’m going to shoot you.”
Witnesses saw her striking Herring through his open window, hitting him with her left hand while holding the handgun in her right hand. Herring did not appear to be fighting back, witnesses said. He was rather holding his arms up, trying to deflect Payne’s blows. At some point, Payne’s gun went off. The bullet struck Herring mid-body, inflicting a fatal wound. A witness saw Payne go back to her Jeep and change her clothes. Hannah told the dispatcher that Herring had shot himself with her gun. Law enforcement authorities believe that, on the contrary, it was she who shot Herring.
Whatever the truth of those fateful seconds when the gun went off and killed him, Kenneth Herring became one of the “innocent people getting shot” that Margaret Payne cited to justify her daughter’s driving around Atlanta in her Jeep Cherokee with a handgun strapped to her side. But Hannah Payne’s lawyer urged the court at a preliminary hearing to see the bright side of things. Hannah was an “All-American girl” who played in her high school band, he argued. “She’s a young individual that got on the phone with 911 and thought she was helping out,” he added. “At her age, she learned a very valuable lesson.”[25] The nature and extent of any “lesson” that she learned is not clear.
Hannah Payne was subsequently indicted on five felony counts, including felony murder, malice murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and possession of a firearm during a felony. Her trial has been postponed several times, and the case is pending at this writing. Hannah’s defense lawyer called the fatal shooting an act of self-defense in the course of a citizen’s arrest gone bad. Clayton County’s district attorney, Tracy Graham Lawson, acidly dismissed Payne’s claim of self-defense. “You cannot claim self-defense and use deadly force unless you’re not the initial aggressor—she is [the aggressor],” Lawson said. Moreover, she pointed out, Georgia law would allow a “citizen’s arrest” only if the citizen witnesses a felony. But the vehicle accident was merely a misdemeanor traffic offense. “I guess she thinks she’s the police or wants to be a police officer . . . she’s blocked him in and he . . . [is unarmed], and then she shoots him.”[26]
The notion of an armed white woman chasing down and then shooting to death an unarmed black man old enough to be her father over a fender-bender shocked many. Questions of race and profiling by Hannah were naturally raised. Herring’s widow, Christine Herring, compared his death to the fatal shooting of teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida.
In Atlanta a “robocall” from a white supremacist group popped up in support of Hannah Payne. It was laced with racial hatred. “Negroes aren’t American,” the message spewed. “They aren’t really fully human. It’s time to send them all to Africa. She’s been cast as the criminal when in fact it was the Negro.”[27]
Payne’s parents and friends—many of whom were people of color, including her boyfriend—rejected the robocall’s support and adamantly insisted that race could not have entered into Hannah’s actions.
“She’s the sweetest, most caring [person],” her mother said. “Hannah does not see color. She sees right, she sees wrong. That’s who she is.”[28]
But research demonstrates that even people who would object to being labeled as “racist” or “discriminating” may harbor unconscious racism that affects their actions in a variety of ways in society generally and specifically in the criminal justice system. According to Dr. David Williams, professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, “the research shows that when people hold a negative stereotype about a group and meet someone from that group, they often treat that person differently and honestly don't even realize it.”[29]
Much of the research to which Dr. Williams referred is based on Implicit Association Tests (IAT). In these laboratory, computerized tests, subjects are first briefly shown an “attitude object” (for example, a white or black person) and then required to select as quickly as possible a “dimension” choice, either evaluative (such as “good” or “bad”) or attributive (such as “guilty” or “not guilty”). The time between the two steps is recorded and analyzed. The time dimension helps measure the person’s subconscious perceptions. The less time there is for deliberate reflection and correction of the subject’s initial connection between the attitude objects and dimension choices, the more likely it is that the subjects’ unconscious attitudes will be demonstrated.[30]
There are many different IAT procedures, testing areas other than race, such as gender perceptions. The authors of a 2010 paper in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law reported that the results of IATs on race consistently show that white Americans express a strong white preference on the IAT. An early study of death penalty defense lawyers came up with the surprising result that these special defense attorneys, whom one would naturally think would be free of bias, “harbored strong implicit bias against African Americans.” Another study of judges conducted at a judicial conference found that the participants “displayed an implicit preference for White over Black. That is, participants were faster to group together photos of White faces with Good words compared to Black faces with Good words.”[31]
If judges, death penalty defense lawyers, and ordinary people have unwitting racial biases, it’s possible that an angry, adrenalin-pumped, and armed Hannah Payne was indeed acting on unconscious racial bias when she confronted Kenneth Herring—whether she knew it or not. And if people who truly believe that they have no racial bias and would be offended to be labeled as racist can nevertheless act on unconscious perceptions of race and racial attributes, what might be expected of someone with overtly expressed racial biases?
That question was answered by another fatal white-on-black shooting in the course of an attempted citizen’s arrest in Georgia. The alleged murder was one of several killings of black men that ignited a revolutionary confrontation in the spring of 2020.
In his argument for abolishing citizen’s arrests for private persons, law professor Ira P. Robbins explained that “it is exceedingly difficult for private individuals to understand the doctrine’s subtleties and to effectuate arrests lawfully, safely, and without fear of reprisal. Implementation is ripe for abuse.”[32] But even without arrest power, he pointed out, citizens can still play a useful role in law enforcement. “In the age of smartphones and other hi-tech devices, private citizens can easily gather photographic and video evidence of a crime without subjecting themselves or the suspect to the risks associated with a citizen’s arrest.”[33]
In the spring of 2020, there was a cascade of just such citizen-gathered video evidence of multiple cases of crimes—criminal violence by sworn law enforcement officers against persons of color. The videos set off a paroxysm of protests, primarily under the Black Lives Matter banner, against police brutality. Videos taken on cellphones by witnesses and subjects of police actions, or retrieved from surveillance cameras, repeatedly disproved claims of law enforcement officers and their supervisors about violent conduct, ranging from the use of chemical sprays to beatings and fatal chokeholds and shootings.[34] Activists argue that these cases are not unusual or random incidents, but the tip of an iceberg of structural and historical race-based violence in the American law enforcement system.
The killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Satilla Shores, a suburb of Brunswick, Georgia, by three private citizens attempting a citizen’s arrest was prominent among these incidents. The story of Arbery’s murder included a tragic irony—the video was recorded by one of the three vigilantes. The damning evidence in that video led to the arrest and indictment of all three white participants for the crime of murder. Seeing the images of Ahmaud Arbery’s final moments was compared by many to watching a lynching.
Facts dragged out of the reluctant officials who first dealt with the case exposed ugly, systemic factors linked to a long history of racial bias and unchecked police violence. These facts implicated the local police in condoning—perhaps even encouraging—armed violence by private citizens, exposed the complicity of local prosecutors in helping police cover up the vigilantes’ criminal conduct by shutting down the case, and revealed several prosecutors’ violations of Georgia conflict of interest laws. It showed a “good old boy” network with tendrils that wound all the way back to Atlanta and wrapped around voter suppression and Tex McIver.
The port city of Brunswick lies on Georgia’s southeastern coast, just about midway between Savannah and Jacksonville, Florida. Brunswick won praise during the civil rights revolution of the 1960s as a “model Southern city,” a less prominent version of Atlanta, “the city too busy to hate.” In both cases, local leaders were said to have taken a cooperative path to the attempted integration of the races that convulsed other cities all over America. And in both cases, another generation has raised questions about the depth and durability of whatever change might be credited to the leaders of that era.[35]
Brunswick is the county seat of Glynn County and is its only municipality. Created in 1777, Glynn County is one of Georgia’s original eight counties. Like much of Georgia, it was carved out of land taken from Creek Indians. The city was named in honor of England’s King George III, who was of the royal House of Brunswick.[36] The U.S. Census Bureau most recently estimated that about eighty-five thousand people live in Glynn County, of whom 69 percent are white and 27 percent black.[37] The county is home to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, where officers from 105 U.S. government agencies are sent to train. It is located northwest of Brunswick.[38]
Satilla Shores is a tiny community just south of the city. There are but five short streets in Satilla Shores. A mostly white suburb, it curls along a bend in the Little Satilla River, part of a network of waterways and marshes in the Georgia Lowcountry.
A bit further to the south, the larger Satilla River runs to the coast. The Satilla River was one of four along which white slave owners operated large and profitable rice plantations from the earliest days of slavery in Georgia. There was, the New Georgia Encyclopedia observes, “a very close connection—indeed, a near identity—between black labor and white rice in Georgia.”[39] About a half-hour’s drive north up Interstate 95 is one of Glynn County’s tourist attractions, the Hofwyl-Broadfield Plantation State Historic Site. According to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, “This beautiful plantation represents the history and culture of Georgia’s rice coast. . . . The plantation owners were part of the genteel low-country society that developed during the antebellum period.”[40]
The benefits of Southern gentility did not extend to the black slaves upon whose labor that pleasant society was built. An average of forty-eight slaves worked on the typical rice plantation. That work required them to do long days’ work bent over with hoes; use primitive, labor-intensive threshing and reaping methods; and constantly work exposed to unhealthy marsh country elements.[41] “The rice too is whitening . . . but there is no living near it with the putrid water that must lie on it, and the labour required for it is only fit for slaves, and I think the hardest work I have seen them engaged in,” a Scottish “lady of quality” wrote in her late-eighteenth-century journal documenting her travels in the Caribbean and American South.[42] “For much of the day, slaves worked in knee-deep water. This . . . environment fostered illnesses, such as dysentery and malaria, that ravaged slaves’ health and shortened their lives,” scholar Watson W. Jennison wrote in his book about the history of slavery in Georgia. “The work regime for slaves on rice plantations in Georgia was strenuous, periodically exhausting, and year-around.”[43]
Emancipation did not much improve the lives of former slaves in Georgia rice country. The collapse of rice plantations after the slaves were freed was “profoundly painful and dislocating to Lowcountry blacks, both economically and socially.”[44]
Satilla Shores was described by the New York Times as “a mixed bag of blue- and white-collar retirees, young working-class families, lifelong residents and transplants from northern states.”[45] The community is almost exclusively white. U.S. Highway 17 was an historic racial dividing line, a barrier between white Satilla Shores on one side and the black community known as Fancy Bluff on the other. Although a handful of people of color have in recent years moved into Satilla Shores, it can hardly be described as welcoming. Confederate flags fly from the homes of some of the white householders. A resident of mixed Puerto Rican and Dominican descent told the New York Times that when he waves to his neighbors from his yard, “A lot of people don’t even wave back to us.”[46]
Law enforcement is handled by the Glynn County Police Department. The county is one of only about a dozen counties (out of 159) in Georgia in which a county police department—rather than a county sheriff’s office—provides primary law enforcement in unincorporated areas and under agreements with some municipalities. Such county police departments are seen as more responsive to the local politicians who appoint them. The Glynn county sheriff is responsible for running the jails and providing courtroom security.
Georgia’s judiciary has a complex structure. Each of the state’s 159 counties—second only to Texas in number—has a Superior Court in which felonies are tried. The counties are divided into forty-nine judicial circuits. The judicial circuits include varying numbers of counties, some only one county. The Brunswick Judicial Circuit includes Glynn and four other counties. Criminal prosecutions in each judicial circuit are overseen by a district attorney, an elected office with a four-year term. As is the case virtually everywhere in the American criminal justice system, Georgia’s district attorneys have wide discretion in deciding whether and which crimes to prosecute, and wield powerful influence in their recommendations for sentencing.[47] Jackie Johnson, a graduate of the University of Georgia law school and a career prosecutor, has been district attorney of the Brunswick Judicial Circuit since 2010.[48]
Both the Glynn County Police Department and District Attorney Johnson were under fire for perceived problems even before the Arbery murder became widely known. But the fallout from that shooting intensified pressure to abolish the county police department and to fire Johnson.[49]
In February 2020, less than a week after Ahmaud Arbery was shot to death—and while the facts of his homicide were still being covered up—Glynn County Police Chief John Powell and three active or former police officers were indicted on charges stemming from an internal investigation into misconduct by police officers working on a drug task force. That investigation originally looked into allegations that one of the officers was having sexual relations with an informant, using drugs himself, and supplying them to informants. The resulting indictment charged the defendants with a range of crimes including violation of oath, attempt to commit a felony, influencing a witness, perjury, and making false statements to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI).[50]
The drug task force investigation exposed a culture of covering up corruption at the highest levels in the Glynn County Police Department. Immoral misconduct is one thing. Shooting an unarmed civilian to death is another. And the fatal shooting of a young white woman by two white Glynn county police officers in 2010 still festers a decade later as an example of unchecked police brutality. Prosecutor Johnson also has been under fire for her alleged help in shielding the officers involved from accountability for their actions.
The shooting occurred after the slow speed police chase of thirty-five-year-old Caroline Small, a mother of two. The unarmed woman’s putative offense was reckless driving. So, in essence, this was a lengthy, slow motion traffic stop. The chase ended when Small’s Buick Century spun out and was hemmed in on all sides by two police cars, a ditch, and a utility pole. A thorough investigation of the case by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2015, based on reports and photographs of the incident as well as independent interviews, established conclusively that there was no place left for Small to go. More specifically, the space between the police cars hemming her in was too small for her car to have gotten out of the box she was in, even though she did feebly try. But two police officers—Sergeant Robert C. Sasser and Officer Michael T. Simpson—nevertheless claimed that they felt threatened by her apparent attempt to move the car. The newspaper’s report described in detail what happened to Caroline Small:
Officer Sasser’s dash cam video shows Small backing up into the utility pole, then pulling forward and bumping into his county vehicle. At roughly the same time, Georgia State Patrol Trooper Jonathan Malone is seen running behind Small’s vehicle in an effort to extract her from the driver’s side, but he retreats when he sees Glynn County officers with their guns pointed at the Buick.
“Let me get out there and get her out,” Malone calls out to the other officers, according to the GBI audio transcripts.
“Hold on, hold on,” one unknown officer responds.
“If she moves the car, I’m going to shoot her,” Simpson says.
Moments later gunfire erupts and Small is hit by police bullets.
After the shooting, Sasser and Simpson are heard on video discussing the shoot.
“Where did you hit her?” Simpson asks, according to a GBI transcript.
“I hit her right in the face,” Sasser says.
“I watched the bridge of her nose. . . . I pulled the trigger and I watched it hit her at the same time I think I fired,” Simpson says.[51]
The brutality of the shooting and the two shooters’ callous comments shocked other law enforcement officers. “This is the worst one I’ve ever investigated,” a retired GBI agent who supervised the 2010 criminal investigation into the officers’ actions told the newspaper. “I don’t think it’s a good shoot. I don’t think it’s justified.”[52]
A grand jury declined to indict the officers. A federal judge threw out a civil lawsuit, ruling that although the shooting was “unnecessary,” it did not violate Small’s constitutional rights. That lawsuit was one of at least seventeen brought against the department over the last decade.[53]
The newspaper’s report on its own investigation into the shooting concluded that
Glynn County police officers interfered with the GBI’s investigation from the start, seeking to protect the officers, the department tampered with the crime scene and created misleading evidence that was shown to the grand jury, and the local district attorney [Johnson] shared the state’s evidence with the officers nearly two months before the grand jury convened and cut an unusual deal with them just before it met.[54]
In June 2018 one of the two officers involved, Sasser, shot and killed his estranged wife and her boyfriend, then committed suicide. Simpson, the other officer, had earlier died of cancer.[55] Some activists argued that had Sasser been properly investigated and disciplined for the 2010 shooting of Caroline Small, the ultimate trail of violence he left would have been avoided. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution detailed the alleged missteps of the Brunswick prosecutor’s office in a 2020 investigatory story about a senior assistant district attorney who the paper charged “has a dark legacy of problem cases over the years—cases in which judges later found he cheated to win.”[56]
Accountability, or its lack, have long-term consequences.
When Ahmaud Arbery was shot to death on February 23, 2020, the investigation of his death fell into the hands of the tainted Glynn County Police Department and the tarnished district attorney of the Brunswick Judicial District.[57] The investigation would be marked by an elaborate series of moves by police and several prosecutors intended to hush up the shooting and exonerate the three vigilantes involved.
On Sunday, February 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery dressed in his jogging outfit and headed out for a run. Eight years earlier, he had been a star linebacker on the Brunswick High School football team, dreaming of a career in the National Football League. But his five feet, ten inches stature was too small for the pros. After his high school graduation, Arbery wandered in and out of several educational and employment opportunities, but he seemed never to find a consistent stride. He also had a few brushes with the law. Defenders of his killers would later magnify these scrapes as evidence of Arbery’s contributory badness, as if two or three misdemeanors justified a vigilante death penalty. Most recently, Ahmaud had been working at his father’s lawn care business and, according to his family and friends, devoting himself to his fitness. A former employer and mentor saw Arbery a few days before he was shot to death. “He said he was getting into shape, and was in a good place,” the friend was reported as saying. “I told him he was looking good, real good.”[58]
At about 1:00 p.m., Arbery crossed U.S. Highway 17 and entered the Satilla Shores neighborhood. At least some of the white residents of the community were concerned about what they perceived to be a recent increase in crime in the neighborhood. Among them were Gregory McMichael, aged sixty-four, his son Travis McMichael, aged thirty-four, and William “Roddie” Bryan, aged fifty.
GBI investigators would later find evidence that among these three men, at least Travis McMichael had a record of using racial slurs. GBI Special Agent Richard Dial testified in a preliminary hearing that the investigation found multiple posts using the N word by Travis on social media. The posts were discovered on Travis’s cellphone and on social media sites—both before and after Arbery’s death.[59] As an example, Dial stated that in January 2020 someone sent Travis a picture or video on Instagram. “He made some comment that it would only be better if they had ‘blown the f—ing n—er’s head off,’” Dial said. He also stated that when Travis was in the U.S. Coast Guard, “he made the statement that he loved his job because he’s out on a boat and there aren’t any n-words anywhere.”[60]
Some observers reported that the residents of Satilla Shores were “on edge” because of a recent rash of crime. “We’ve been having a lot of burglaries and break-ins around here lately,” Travis McMichael told a 911 operator earlier in the month, when he called in to report a suspicious person in the neighborhood. In fact, however, police had not filed any burglary reports for some months, although between August 2019 and February 2020 there had been “87 calls from Satilla Shore reporting various activity, including suspicious behavior, trespassing and thefts.”[61] In fact, Glynn County Police told CNN, the only record of a recent burglary in Satilla Shores was on January 1, 2020, when Travis McMichael reported to police that a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol had been stolen from his unlocked truck.[62]
Two factors that research demonstrates affect perceptions about crime may have contributed to an exaggerated view of Satilla Shore’s supposed crime wave. One factor is that “[although] crime is commonly perceived in geographic terms, it is also perceived in social terms. That is, there appear to be widely accepted images of dangerous persons, with the result that some persons in the population are feared more than others.”[63] It is no surprise that the persons feared most are young males and in particular young males of color. The findings “suggest that blacks (or, most probably, young black males) are frequently typified as criminals or potential criminals and, as a consequence, are feared more than others.”[64]
Tex McIver demonstrated his acceptance of “widely accepted images of dangerous persons” of color when he asked for his revolver the night he killed his wife. Ahmaud Arbery regularly jogging through a predominantly white neighborhood may have likewise triggered inflated perceptions of criminal danger, especially in the mind of someone like Travis McMichael, who thinks and acts in racist terms.
In addition to the youth and race factor, polling data over a long period of time shows that “Americans’ perceptions of crime are often at odds with the data.” Respondents to polls are “usually more likely to say crime is up than down, regardless of what official statistics show.”[65] Presidents Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Donald Trump, and other politicians have notoriously exploited these distorted perceptions of crime for political gain, a means of inciting white racial fears under the false flag of “law and order.”[66]
One important thing is clear. Whether or not Satilla Shores was experiencing an increase in petty crimes like “suspicious behavior” and “trespassing,” there is no evidence of a violent crime wave, or for that matter any violent crime—no assaults, no homicides, no rapes—in the neighborhood during the period residents were supposedly concerned about increasing crime. What Satilla Shore’s vigilantes seemed to be most concerned about was a series of harmless trespasses into a house that had been under construction for some time. Incursions by a number of people of varying ages onto the property triggered the posse in the McMichaels, some of their neighbors, and the Glynn County Police Department.
Ahmaud Arbery was one of the triggers.
The construction site in question was not far from the McMichaels’ residence and only a block away from where Arbery was shot. The property’s owner, Larry English, did not live in Satilla Shores and had installed a motion-activated security camera. The camera picked up people going into the site and sent a text and video to English when that happened. When English received alerts, he often called the police, who went to check on the property. No one was ever caught. Nothing was ever taken from the site. It hadn’t been vandalized.[67]
Nevertheless, the repeated trespasses were burrs under the saddles of the McMichaels and the county police department. Gregory McMichael had retired in 2019 as an investigator from the Brunswick district attorney’s office. Prior to that, he had been an officer in the Glynn County Police Department. He apparently, and quite naturally, kept up his law enforcement ties. In December 2019, Glynn County police officer Robert Rash texted property owner English to tell him that Gregory McMichael lived nearby and was willing to help with the trespass problem.
“Greg is retired Law Enforcement and also a Retired Investigator from the DA’s office,” Rash texted English, adding McMichael’s phone number. “He said please call him day or night when you get action on your camera.”[68] English ignored the offer and says he later forgot it. He never called McMichael, nor did he have any other contact with him.
Officer Rash’s text came to light only months later, when the layers of evident police misconduct began to be peeled back under public scrutiny. The unusual text raised questions about the propriety of Officer Rash’s offer. In essence, it informally deputized Gregory McMichael. Moreover, the text raised an apparent conflict of interest when county police were called to investigate the McMichaels and their role in Arbery’s homicide.
Law enforcement officials scathed the Glynn County police action. One of those who raised such questions was Louis M. Dekmar, chief of police of the city of LaGrange, Georgia. Dekmar served terms as president of the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police and of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “I’m not aware of any accepted policy for referring someone that requires a police response to delegate that response to a former law enforcement officer who happens to live in the neighborhood,” Dekmar told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper. “If it’s not a real conflict, it’s certainly a significant perception of one.”[69] Charlie Bailey, a former senior assistant district attorney in Fulton County, ripped the “highly irregular” police offer. “I’ve never heard, in my time as a prosecutor, of police enlisting a civilian to do something that the police are sworn to do,” he said. “You’re not supposed to have civilians acting as police.”[70]
Another critic was S. Lee Merritt, a lawyer for the Arbery family. “We believe this communication deputized a group of untrained men in the Satilla Shores community to hunt down suspected trespassers, causing the events of February 23, 2020,” he said.[71] “If anybody was going to stop this from happening it was law enforcement. Instead, they encouraged it.”[72]
When Ahmaud Arbery jogged by the construction on the last day of his life, he took a short break and went inside the property. From the evidence of the surveillance video it is clear that he took nothing. It is also possible that he may have gone onto the site to get water from a tap. At most, he had committed nothing more serious than a misdemeanor trespass. GBI Investigator Dial testified that for Arbery to be charged with the felony of burglary, it would have to be shown that he entered “with the intention of committing a felony or a theft. Neither fact could I establish in my investigation.”[73]
When Ahmaud left, he was seen by a resident. A hue and cry by cellphone was raised. The report that county police filed immediately after the incident described the first moments of the three vigilantes’ mobilization:
McMichael stated there have been several Break-ins in the neighborhood and further the suspect was caught on surveillance video. McMichael states that he was in his front yard and saw the suspect from the break-ins “hauling ass” down Satilla Drive . . . McMichael stated he then ran inside his house and called to Travis (McMichael) and said “Travis the guy is running down the street lets go.” McMichael stated he went to his bedroom and grabbed his .357 Magnum and Travis grabbed his shotgun because they “didn’t know if the male was armed or not.”[74]
The McMichaels jumped into their pickup truck. Travis was driving and Gregory was standing in the truck bed. The .357 Magnum revolver that Gregory brandished had been issued to him when he was a Glynn County police officer.[75]
“They decided he was somewhere he shouldn’t be and they decided to catch him,” agent Dial testified. As noted previously, there had been no reported “break-ins” in Satilla Shores, only a handful of misdemeanor offenses. The McMichaels on that day and at that moment had not witnessed a felony, the threshold for justifying a citizen’s arrest under Georgia law.
What was left was Ahmaud Arbery, a black man, simply being “somewhere he shouldn’t be,” a circumstance that has not been legal justification for armed interference with a black man since the days of slave patrols and Jim Crow terror against “vagrants.” W.E.B. Du Bois described that hateful circumstance in his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk:
A black stranger in Baker County, Georgia, for instance, is liable to be stopped anywhere on the public highway and made to state his business to the satisfaction of any white interrogator. If he fails to give a suitable answer, or seems too independent or “sassy,” he may be arrested or summarily driven away.[76]
Seeing Arbery’s pursuit by his white interrogators, Roddie Bryan got into his truck and joined in. At some point he began recording the chase, apparently with a dash camera. Prosecutors have stated that they have access to a video made by Bryan that is longer than the one the public has seen. Special Agent Dial testified that Bryan repeatedly blocked Arbery, preventing him from leaving the neighborhood.[77] Originally, Arbery was running in front of and away from the McMichael’s pickup truck. Bryan was behind the truck. But when Arbery doubled back and ran past the truck in the other direction, he came between Bryan and the McMichaels. Bryan attempted to box Arbery in. His truck struck Arbery hard enough to leave a dent and cotton fibers from the young man’s clothing stuck to his car.[78]
Arbery doubled back again, running away from Bryan and toward the McMichael’s truck. It is at this point, about four minutes into the hunt, that the video recorded by Bryan documents what happened. A New York Times minute-by-minute reconstruction of the events—based on Bryan’s tape, a home surveillance video, and the record of phone calls—documents Ahmaud Arbery’s final seconds of life:
Arbery doesn’t know where to run. He veers right, then left and then darts around the right side of the [McMichael’s] vehicle. Arbery comes around the front of the truck. We see his white T-shirt through the windshield and here is Travis now leaning toward him. This is the instant the first shot is fired. Arbery is hit in the chest, his right lung, ribs, and sternum are injured. The two men wrestle over the gun. Gregory shouts: “Travis!” Arbery punches Travis. In the back of the truck, Gregory drops the cellphone. A second blast goes off out of frame. But we see the shotgun smoke here. Arbery is heavily bleeding. He throws another punch. Travis fires a final shot, which hits Arbery in his left upper chest.[79]
The coroner ruled that Arbery died at 1:46 p.m.
Ahmaud Arbery was “chased, hunted down and ultimately executed,” Jesse Evans, the case’s ultimate lead prosecutor, charged in a hearing.[80] And according to Roddie Bryan, racial animus was at the heart of Arbery’s death. He told investigators that after Travis McMichael shot Arbery to death, he stood over the young man’s body and shouted, “F—ing n—!”[81]
Two and a half months—seventy-four days—were to pass before the McMichaels were arrested and another two weeks after that before Bryan was arrested. In the meantime the facts of Ahmaud Arbery’s death were suppressed, and a fantastic story was invented to explain his death, all amounting to a rolling cover-up that involved several prosecutors and the police.
The Glynn County hoedown began the moment Glynn County police officer Jake Brandeberry wrote up his report of the incident.
McMichael stated they saw the unidentified male and shouted “stop, stop, we want to talk to you.” McMichael stated they pulled up beside the male and shouted stop again at which time Travis exited the truck with the shotgun. McMichael stated the unidentified male began to violently attack Travis and the two men then started fighting over the shotgun at which point Travis fired a shot and then a second later there was a second shot. Michael stated the male fell face down on the pavement with his hand under his body. McMichael stated he rolled the man over to see if the male had a weapon.[82]
This was the birth of a notion, a contrived explanation shifting the entire blame for Ahmaud Arbery’s death to himself. Virtuous citizens—not incidentally armed with a shotgun and a .357 Magnum police-issued revolver—chased down and cornered an unarmed black man who (quite improbably) then violently attacked Travis, the man wielding the shotgun, an extraordinarily dangerous weapon at close range. Self-defense mandated that Travis shoot to protect himself from the unarmed but (stereotypically) violent black man. The audacity of this bottom-of-the-deck card deal boggles the impartial mind. And yet, improbable as this scenario seems, it was accepted without apparent question by the minions of the Glynn County Police Department. They sent the McMichaels and Bryan on their way.
Later that day, a police investigator called Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper Jones, and told her that her son had been involved in a burglary and was confronted by the homeowner. The two fought over the homeowner’s gun, multiple shots were fired, and Ahmaud was killed.[83] A commentator later captured the racial context that cried out from Arbery’s bloodied body:
It’s a useful mental exercise to imagine two black men, one armed with a .357 magnum, the other with a warm shotgun, having this conversation with a white police officer over the dead body of an unarmed white man. The elder black man explains that, unfortunately, the white man died from a gunshot wound. But, he notes, the white man had been seen on a surveillance video, and there had recently been some break-ins in the neighborhood.[84]
The facts of the case were kept from the Arbery family and the general public for over two months. It was if Ahmaud Arbery’s violent death never occurred. Meanwhile, a carousel of prosecutors cycled through the case, each handing it off within what Ahmaud’s mother later called “the good ole boy network.”[85]
Jackie Johnson, the Brunswick Judicial Circuit district attorney—who was criticized for her handling of the aftermath of the Christine Small homicide—reportedly decided on the day of Arbery’s death that her office had a conflict of interest because Gregory McMichael had been an investigator in the office. She asked George E. Barnhill, district attorney for Waycross Judicial Circuit, to take over the case, even though, as it later developed, he too had an apparent conflict of interest. In the face of its known conflict, her office nevertheless discussed the shooting with Glynn County Police by phone several times that day. Moreover, Johnson waited three days until she notified Georgia State Attorney General Chris Carr’s office of the conflict and suggested Prosecutor Barnhill—after he had already made his decision not to prosecute. This was the first of several missteps, including violations of Georgia procedural law, that prompted state and federal investigations of the two prosecutors’ actions in the Arbery case.[86]
According to independent critics, Johnson should have notified Carr’s office immediately, without enlisting Barnhill to take over the case. “Once you have a conflict, the prosecutor’s office is done—no indictments, no accusations, no bonds and no finding a substitute prosecutor,” according to a PowerPoint presentation of training offered by Carr’s office and by the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia. Recommending a replacement was not uncommon, a spokesperson for Attorney General Carr’s office said. “What would be uncommon is if a prosecutor who has a conflict makes the unilateral decision to bring in another prosecutor on his or her own or asks or allows another prosecutor to take actions that would be inappropriate given their own conflict,” she said.[87]
Barnhill, district attorney for Georgia’s Waycross Judicial Circuit, also recused himself after Arbery’s mother found out that Barnhill’s son, an assistant prosecutor, used to work with Gregory McMichael in the Brunswick District Attorney’s Office.[88] Barnhill’s son had not only worked with McMichael for several years, but had been directly involved in one of Ahmaud Arbery’s scrapes with the law.
But Barnhill was dug in. After his recusal, he wrote a tendentious, three-page letter to the Glynn County chief of police, going over the case and justifying his prior conclusion that the evidence did not support prosecution.
“We do not see grounds for an arrest of any of the three parties,” Barnhill wrote. “It appears Travis McMichael, Greg McMichael, and Bryan William [sic] were following, in ‘hot pursuit,’ a burglary suspect with solid first hand probable cause, in their neighborhood, and asking/telling him to stop. It appears their intent was to stop and hold this criminal suspect until law enforcement arrived. Under Georgia Law this is perfectly legal.” The prosecutor also recycled the theory that Travis McMichael was acting in self-defense, after Ahmaud supposedly grabbed Travis’s shotgun. “A brief skirmish ensues in which it appears Arbery strikes McMichael and appears to grab the shotgun and pull it from McMichael. . . . Just as importantly, while we know McMichael had his finger on the trigger, we do not know who caused the firings.”[89]
Barnhill’s “gratuitous and detailed opinion” won him a stinging rebuke from the National District Attorneys Association, which noted that his involvement with the case should have ended as soon as he recused himself.
These actions can have an intended or unintended ability to influence potential grand jurors or trial jurors, while also making the new special prosecutor’s job to objectively seek the truth significantly more difficult. No prosecutor should inject his or her opinion into a pending case to the point where she or he becomes a potential witness and risks compromising the just outcome of a case.[90]
The organization’s president, Duffie Stone, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Barnhill’s letter crossed a clear line that prosecutors everywhere know is wrong. “It’s not how you do it,” said Stone. “It’s assumed that when you conflict yourself out of a case you have to stop at that point. You can’t seek to influence it. This is highly unusual.”[91]
It’s not as if Barnhill was a stranger to vigorous prosecutions. His office spent years hounding a black official on trumped-up charges of “voter fraud.” The case dates to 2012, when Olivia Pearson showed a first-time voter how to operate a voting machine. There was no evidence that Pearson attempted to influence the voter’s ballot. The incident was referred to the Georgia State Election Board—on which Tex McIver then served. The board decided that state law “might have” been violated. Barnhill’s office took the bit in its teeth and secured Pearson’s indictment on charges of voter fraud. It doggedly pursued her through two trials, the first of which ended in a hung jury when a lone black juror held out against conviction. Six years after the original event, it took another jury only twenty minutes to find Pearson not guilty. The case was widely seen as a blatant attempt at suppressing the black vote.[92]
Everything changed in the Ahmaud Arbery case on May 5, 2020, when Roddie Bryan’s dash cam video was leaked to social media and “went viral.” The entire world could at last see with its own eyes the hunt and kill operation. The incident was one of the first to inspire large demonstrations in the angry spring of 2020. The GBI took over the investigation the next day. Two days later, on May 7, the McMichaels were arrested and charged with murder and aggravated assault. Two weeks later, Bryan was also charged.
The case finally landed in the office of the Cobb County district attorney, Joyette M. Holmes. On June 24, 2020, the three men each were indicted on nine counts: malice murder, four counts of felony murder, two counts of aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment.[93]
As in many similar cases, defenders of the killers have attempted to smear the victim with hints of some kind of contributory badness, implying that Ahmaud Arbery may have got what was coming to him. Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public-policy arm, the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, shredded that line of argument in a thundering online essay:
[T]he arguments, already bandied about on social media, that “Arbery wasn’t a choirboy” are revolting. We have heard such before with Trayvon Martin and in almost every case since. For all I know, Arbery was a choirboy. But even if he were the complete opposite (let’s suppose just for the sake of argument), that is no grounds to be chased down and shot by private citizens. There is no, under any Christian vision of justice, situation in which the mob murder of a person can be morally right.
In the end, Gregory and Travis McMichael and Roddie Bryan were the beneficiaries of what they had brutally denied Ahmaud Arbery—due process under law, a regular procedure of professional investigation, presentation of the facts to a grand jury, indictment, the chance for a jury trial, and an appeals process.
Like the tens of dozens of other black men shot dead on suspicions raised by the twice-ground lens of race, Ahmaud Arbery got an untimely death and a funeral.
Sally E. Haddon, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 4.
Teo Armus, “White Woman ‘Terminated’ from Job after Calling Police on Black Birdwatcher Who Asked Her to Leash Her Dog, Company Says,” Washington Post, May 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/26/amy-cooper-central-park/.
The Associated Press, “Student: Response to Professor Who Called Police not Enough,” ABC News, January 24, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/student-response-professor-called-police-68517776.
Theresa Braine, “Detroit Man Settled Antidiscrimination Lawsuit with His Employer, then Bank Called Cops When He Went to Deposit the Checks,” New York Daily News, January 23, 2020, https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-detroit-antidiscrimination-suit-bank-not-cash-check-20200124-osl3sx7knjc47camrl6vdpb354-story.html.
Mariel Padilla, “Black Deliveryman Says He Was Blocked and Interrogated by White Driver,” New York Times, May 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/17/us/black-delivery-driver-okc-travis-miller.html?.
See, for example, David Frum, “The Chilling Effects of Openly Displayed Firearms,” The Atlantic, August 16, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/open-carry-laws-mean-charlottesville-could-have-been-graver/537087/; Mark Tran, “Men with Guns Swell Protest Crowds Outside Obama Meetings,” The Guardian, August 17, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/aug/18/gun-protests-obama; David Welch, “Michigan Cancels Legislative Session to Avoid Armed Protesters,” Bloomberg News, May 14, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-14/michigan-cancels-legislative-session-to-avoid-armed-protesters; Hannah Knowles, “A Tiny Ohio Town’s Black Lives Matter Event was Overrun by Armed Counterprotesters,” Washington Post, June 16, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/16/bethel-ohio-black-lives-counterprotest/.
For a comprehensive scholarly discussion of the origins and problems in citizen’s arrests, see Ira P. Robbins, “Vilifying the Vigilante: A Narrowed Scope of Citizen’s Arrest,” Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, 2016, Vol. 25, No. 3, Article 1, h7p://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cjlpp/vol25/iss3/1.
Seth W. Stoughton, “Ahmaud Arbery’s Killing Puts a Spotlight on the Blurred Blue Line of Citizen’s Arrest Laws,” The Conversation, May 29, 2020, https://theconversation.com/ahmaud-arberys-killing-puts-a-spotlight-on-the-blurred-blue-line-of-citizens-arrest-laws-139275.
Frances Robles, “The Citizen’s Arrest Law Cited in Arbery’s Killing Dates Back to the Civil War,” New York Times, May 13, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/article/ahmaud-arbery-citizen-arrest-law-georgia.html?.
Statute of Winchester, 13 Edward I, c. 1-6 (U.K.) (October 8, 1285), https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Statute_of_Winchester&oldid=3719325.
Robles, “The Citizen’s Arrest Law Cited”; Robbins, “Vilifying the Vigilante,” 565.
LaFave, Criminal Law, Section 10.7(a), 558–59.
LaFave, Criminal Law, Sections 10.7, 558, and 10.7(d), 564.
LaFave, Criminal Law, Section 10.7(a), 562–63.
Alan J. Singer, “Citizen’s Arrest: Racist at its Roots,” History News Network, May 24, 2020, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/175619.
Nicholas Reimann, “Georgia Lawmakers Look to Repeal 1863 Citizen’s Arrest Law After Arbery Killing,” Forbes, June 4, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/06/04/georgia-lawmakers-look-to-repeal-1863-citizens-arrest-law-after-arbery-killing/#7c1921d85e1d.; Robles, “The Citizen’s Arrest Law Cited.”
“One Man's ‘Little Stand’ Against Crime,” Atlanta Journal, March 30, 1989 (available in Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives).
“Henry Man Charged after He ‘Arrests’ Teens,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, July 4, 2000 (available in Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives).
“Citizen’s Arrest Wins No Medals,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 15, 2005 (available in Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives).
See Georgia Code, O.C.G.A. 16-11-129 (2010), “License to Carry Weapon.”
The events of the Hannah Payne incident are based on these sources: Clayton County Georgia Superior Court Records, Case No. 2019CR01737, filed June 20, 2019; Clayton County detective’s testimony at preliminary hearing, Channel 11 News, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTWPNDdT74c and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qScNpaKBGQo; Channel 11 News interview with Hannah Payne’s parents, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=25&v=0JlOGlrjaDU&feature=emb_logo; Zachary Hansen, “Racist Robocall Defends Murder Suspect Who Intervened in Hit-and-Run,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 14, 2019, https://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/racist-robocall-defends-murder-suspect-who-intervened-hit-and-run/gEh7ROIniIN7aKxnNAN86J/; Jonathan Raymond, “Shot Dead after a Hit and Run: A Witness Accused of Murder; The Victim May Have Been in Diabetic Shock,” WXIA-TV, May 28, 2019, https://www.11alive.com/article/news/crime/shot-dead-after-a-hit-and-run-a-witness-accused-of-murder-the-victim-may-have-been-in-diabetic-shock/85-21155108-40e9-4af1-b944-d1ede36356fb; Zachary Hansen, “Murder Suspect Who Intervened in Hit-and-Run Allegedly Ignored 911 Operator,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 28, 2019, https://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/murder-suspect-who-intervened-hit-and-run-allegedly-ignored-911-operator/LD3CtlelcLkFciyRnEBWjJ/; Jonathan Raymond, “Woman who Allegedly Pursued and Killed Man after Hit-and-Run Can Be Released on Bond, Judge Rules,” WXIA-TV, May 31, 2019, https://www.11alive.com/article/news/woman-who-allegedly-killed-man-after-hit-and-run-can-be-released-on-bond-judge-rules/85-b4710304-f2a0-4aea-b7bc-93a4d8fde637; Asia Simone Burns, “New Charges for Woman Accused of Intervening in Hit-and-Run, Fatally Shooting Driver,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 21, 2019, https://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/new-charges-for-woman-accused-intervening-hit-and-run-fatally-shooting-driver/p6H9HhoKwWBYBgQ3F2JllO/; Tanasia Kenney, “Black Woman Judge to Decide Fate of Vigilante Who Shot, Killed Man Following Hit-and-Run Incident,” Atlanta Black Star, December 23, 2019, https://atlantablackstar.com/2019/12/23/black-woman-judge-to-decide-fate-of-vigilante-who-shot-killed-man-following-hit-and-run-incident/; Robin Kemp, “Hannah Payne Murder Trial Delayed Again; Was Set for March 9,” Clayton Daily News (Jonesboro, GA), February 27, 2020, https://www.news-daily.com/news/hannah-payne-murder-trial-delayed-again-was-set-for-march-9/article_6a12e888-5977-11ea-8828-93d05dd2f9bb.html.
Channel 11 News interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=25&v=0JlOGlrjaDU&feature=emb_logo.
“Hypoglycemia Overview,” Mayo Clinic, https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hypoglycemia/symptoms-causes/syc-20373685?p=1.
Alex J. Graveling and Brian M. Frier, “Driving and Diabetes: Problems, Licensing Restrictions and Recommendations for Safe Driving,” Clinical Diabetes and Endocrinology, 2018, Vol. 1, No. 8, DOI 10.1186/s40842-015-0007-3.
Robin Kemp, “Hannah Payne Murder Trial on Hold Until February 2020,” Clayton News-Daily.com, December 10, 2019, https://www.news-daily.com/news/hannah-payne-murder-trial-on-hold-until-february-2020/article_1ac5d394-1b88-11ea-a670-5b2171b23ea1.html; Frances Robles, “The Citizen’s Arrest Law Cited in Arbery’s Killing Dates Back to the Civil War.”
Raymond, “Shot Dead after a Hit and Run.”
Hansen, “Racist Robocall Defends Murder Suspect.”
Channel 11 News interview.
Mikhail Lyubansky, “Studies of Unconscious Bias: Racism Not Always by Racists,” Psychology Today, April 26, 2012, https://www.psychologytoday
.com/us/blog/between-the-lines/201204/studies-unconscious-bias-racism-not
-always-racists.
For scholarly descriptions and discussions of IAT testing and results, see, for example, Troy Duster, “Introduction to Unconscious Racism Debate,” Social Psychology Quarterly, 2008, Vol. 71, No. 1, 6–11; Justin D. Levinson, Huajian Cai, and Danielle Young, “Guilt by Implicit Racial Bias: The Guilty/Not Guilty Implicit Association Test,” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, 2009, Vol. 8, 187; Samuel R. Sommers and Michael I. Norton, “Race-Based Judgments, Race-Neutral Justifications: Experimental Examination of Peremptory Use and the Batson Challenge Procedure,” Law Hum Behav, 2007, Vol. 31, 261–73.
Levinson, et al., “Guilt by Implicit Racial Bias.”
Robbins, “Vilifying the Vigilante,” 557.
Robbins, “Vilifying the Vigilante,” 599.
Audra D. S. Burch and John Eligon, “Bystander Videos of George Floyd and Others Are Policing the Police,” New York Times, May 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/us/george-floyd-minneapolis-police.html; Ryan J. Foley, “Video evidence increasingly disproves police narratives,” Denver Post, June 9, 2020, https://www.denverpost.com/2020/06/09/video-evidence-increasingly-disproves-police-narratives/.
Orlando Montoya, “50 Years Later: The ‘Quiet Conflict,’” Georgia Public Broadcasting, August 26, 2013, https://www.gpb.org/news/2013/08/26/50-years-later-the-quiet-conflict; Jenny Jarvie and Clare Busch, “In Brunswick, Georgia, Residents Reflect on the Shooting of Ahmaud Arbery,” Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-08/in-brunswick-georgia-residents-reflect-on-the-shooting-of-ahmaud-arbery; Rick Rojas and John Eligon, “In Ahmaud Arbery’s Hometown, Pain, Anger and Pride in a Shared Racial History,” New York Times, May 10, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/us/ahmaud-arbery-shooting-brunswick-georgia.html.
“About Glynn,” Glynn County, GA Official Website, https://www.glynncounty.org/1339/About-Glynn.
U.S. Census Bureau, “Quick Facts, Glynn County, Georgia,” https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/glynncountygeorgia,US/PST045219.
“Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Law_Enforcement_Training_Centers.
Peter A. Coclanis, “Rice,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, December 9, 2019, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-economy/rice.
Georgia Department of Natural Resources, “Hofwyl-Broadfield Plantation State Historic Site,” https://gastateparks.org/HofwylBroadfieldPlantation. The collapse of the rice industry following emancipation of black slaves was devastating for the region.
Ralph Betts Flanders, Plantation Slavery in Georgia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933, reprint by Literary Licensing, LLC), 42–43. Flanders is a useful source on many factual details of slavery in Georgia, but his commentary is of the flawed “lost cause” type and clearly influenced by his race-based perceptions.
Janet Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality, Evangeline Walker Andrews, editor (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005, accessed on Questia.com), 194. Schaw’s writings are laced with manifest “white privilege.” She has been characterized “by her immersion in and relish for the world of aristocratic privilege . . . consumed by the perquisites and appurtenances of such privilege.” Keith A. Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000, accessed through Questia.com), 91.
Watson M. Jennison, Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750-1860 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 29.
Coclanis, “Rice.”
Richard Fausset and Rick Rojas, “Where Ahmaud Arbery Ran, Neighbors Cast Wary Eyes,” New York Times, May 22, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/article/satilla-shores-ahmaud-arbery-killing.html.
Fausset and Rojas, “Where Ahmaud Arbery Ran.”
For an overview of Georgia’s system, see “Georgia Judicial System Structure,” https://www.reformgeorgia.org/georgia-judicial-system-structure/.
Teresa Stepzinski, “Georgia Governor Appoints Brunswick District Attorney,” Florida Times-Union, August 9, 2010, https://www.jacksonville.com/article/20100809/NEWS/801247031.
See, for example, Rick Rojas, Richard Fausset, and Serge F. Kovaleski, “Georgia Killing Puts Spotlight on a Police Force’s Troubled History,” New York Times, May 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/us/glynn-county-police-ahmaud-arbery.html; Taylor Cooper, “Jones Call on Governor to Remove DA Johnson, Police Abolition Bill Passes House Committee,” Brunswick News, June 18, 2020, https://thebrunswicknews.com/news/local_news/jones-call-on-governor-to-remove-da-johnson-police-abolition-bill-passes-house-committee/article_7ef56dfa-9548-52dc-bc33-fd5c0701258d.html.
Jim Piggott, “Grand Jury Indicts Glynn County Police Chief, 3 Others,” WJXT News4Jax, February 28, 2020, https://www.news4jax.com/news/georgia/2020/02/28/grand-jury-indicts-glynn-county-police-chief-3-others/; Kayla Davis, “Glynn County Police Chief, Three Officers Indicted, Accused of Multiple Oath Violations on Disbanded Drug Task Force,” First Coast News, February 20, 2020, https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/crime/glynn-county-chief-of-police-three-officers-indicted-on-multiple-violations-of-oath-charges-related-to-disbanded-drug-task-force/77-c6a8ea57-5b78-4338-b95c-2d53c71028f8.
Brad Schrade, “Did Caroline Small Have to Die?” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 2, 2015, https://investigations.ajc.com/caroline-small-shooting/.
Schrade, “Did Caroline Small Have to Die?”
Larry Hobbs and Terry Dickson, “Suspended Glynn Police Officer Dead after Allegedly
Killing Wife, Boyfriend,” Brunswick News, June 29, 2018, https://thebrunswicknews.com/breaking/suspended-glynn-police-officer-dead-after-allegedly-killing-wife-boyfriend/article_0d995c95-3eae-5c5d-9e15-14d5da38720a
.html.
Schrade, “Did Caroline Small Have to Die?”
Hobbs and Dickson, “Suspended Glynn Police Officer Dead.”
Bill Rankin, Brad Schrade, and Joshua Sharpe, “Dark Legacy of Overturned Convictions Trails Longtime Prosecutor,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 24, 2020, https://www.ajc.com/news/dark-legacy-of-overturned-convictions-trails-longtime-prosecutor/4SDCY5SP3FGKPJ4GVUTM4OLAMM/.
This account of Ahmaud Artery’s death is based upon the following sources, unless otherwise noted: Glynn County Police Department, “Public Release Incident Report for G20-11303,” April 1, 2020; letter from George E. Barnhill, District Attorney, Waycross Judicial District to Captain Tom Jump, Glynn County Police Department, April 2, 2020; “Ahmaud Arbery’s Final Minutes: What Videos and 911 Calls Show,” undated transcript, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/article/satilla-shores-ahmaud-arbery-killing.html; Christian Boone and Bert Roughton Jr., “GBI to Launch State Investigation into Brunswick Area Shooting,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 5, 2020, https://www.ajc.com/news/local/bring-charges-against-brunswick-shooter/fz7taEww0Nqfedg8JgXm2K/; Russell Moore, “The Killing of Ahmaud Arbery and the Justice of God,” May 6, 2020, https://www.russellmoore.com/2020/05/06/the-killing-of-ahmaud-arbery-and-the-justice-of-god/; Michael Brice-Saddler, Colby Itkowitz, and Cleve R. Wootson Jr., “Father and Son Charged in the Killing of Black Georgia Jogger, Ahmaud Arbery, after Footage Sparked Outrage,” Washington Post, May 7, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/07/killing-ahmaud-arbery-draws-condemnation-calls-prosecution/; Richard Fausset, “2 Suspects Charged with Murder in Ahmaud Arbery Shooting,” New York Times, May 7, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/us/ahmaud-arbery-shooting-arrest.html; Christian Boone, “Father, Son Charged with Murder in Brunswick Area Shooting,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 8, 2020, https://www.ajc.com/news/local/father-son-charged-with-murder-brunswick-shooting/tWjmSXAeWlD2LKIN1dSmfK/; Dakin Andone, Angela Barajas, and Jason Morris, “A Suspect in the Killing of Ahmaud Arbery was Involved in a Previous Investigation of Him, Recused Prosecutor Says,” CNN, May 9, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/08/us/ahmaud-arbery-mcmichael-arrests-friday/index.html; Joe Henke, “Travis McMichael Named in 2 Incidents Police Responded to in the Weeks before Ahmaud Arbery’s Death,” 11Alive (WXIA), May 13, 2020, https://www.11alive.com/article/news/crime/travis-mcmichael-named-in-2-police-reports-before-arbery-shooting/85-135bab7a-b5bb-40f6-bb1f-3294adb16cda; Brad Schrade, “Police Enlisted Suspect’s Help Months before Arbery Shooting,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 15, 2020, https://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/suspect-arbery-shooting-had-offered-help-police/gFMpkRpX0Zk5edjvXrE6sN/; Richard Fausset, “Suspect in Arbery Shooting Offered to Help Deal With Potential Trespasser,” New York Times, May 16, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/16/us/ahmaud-arbery-gregory-mcmichael.html; Bert Roughton Jr. and Brad Schrade, “Records Show a Neighborhood on Edge before Arbery’s Final Run,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 17, 2020, https://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/records-show-neighborhood-edge-before-arbery-final-jog/P9shmCoRGj90XFWbKfApmJ/; Rick Rojas, “Investigators Say Man Who Filmed Arbery’s Killing Was More Than a Witness,” New York Times, May 22, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/us/ahmaud-arbery-william-roddie-bryan.html; Francis Wilkinson, “Ahmaud Arbery Was the Victim of Two Deadly Cultures,” Bloomberg.com, June 2, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-02/ahmaud-arbery-was-killed-by-a-toxic-mix-of-racism-and-gun-culture; Christian Boone, “GBI: Arbery’s Killer Uttered Racial Epithet after Firing Fatal Shots,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 4, 2020, https://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/gbi-arbery-killer-uttered-racial-epithet-after-firing-fatal-shots/qVQrqQkOPrGxm4JRu5u3JN/; Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Annie Gowen, and Abigail Hauslohner, “Judge Advances Murder Trial for All Three White Men Charged in Death of Ahmaud Arbery,” Washington Post, June 4, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/04/fellow-shooter-called-georgia-jogger-f-ing-n-he-lay-dying-road-agent-testified/; Laura Italiano and Jorge Fitz-Gibbon, “Travis McMichael Allegedly Yelled Racial Slur at Ahmaud Arbery after Shooting,” New York Post, June 4, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/06/04/shooter-allegedly-yelled-racial-slur-at-ahmaud-arbery-during-attack/; Bill Hutchinson and Rachel Katz, “Ahmaud Arbery was Struck by Vehicle before He Was Shot Dead; Suspect Yelled Racial Slur: Investigator,” ABC News, June 4, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/US/suspects-struck-ahmaud-arbery-vehicle-shot-dead-yelled/story?id=71066667; Jorge Fitz-Gibbon, “Man who Filmed Ahmaud Arbery Shooting Admitted He Tried to Block Him In,” New York Post, June 4, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/06/04/man-who-filmed-ahmaud-arbery-shooting-admits-he-tried-to-block-him-in/; Katheryn Tucker, “Racial Slur Shocks Hearing in Ahmaud Arbery Murder Case,” Law.com Daily Report, June 4, 2020, https://www.law.com/dailyreportonline/2020/06/04/racial-slur-shocks-hearing-in-ahmaud-arbery-murder-case/?slreturn=20200526142925; Griff Witte and Michael Brice-Saddler, “Georgia Grand Jury Indicts Three Men in Killing of Ahmaud Arbery,” Washington Post, June 24, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/georgia-ahmaud-arbery-indictment-murder/2020/06/24/e9aac6bc-b668-11ea-aca5-ebb63d27e1ff_story.html.
Roughton and Schrade, “Records Show a Neighborhood on Edge.”
Tucker, “Racial Slur Shocks Hearing.”
Italiano and Fitz-Gibbon, “Travis McMichael Allegedly Yelled Racial Slur.”
Roughton and Schrade, “Records Show a Neighborhood on Edge.”
Andone, et al., “A Suspect in the Killing of Ahmaud Arbery”; Wilkinson, “Ahmaud Arbery Was the Victim.” Burglary was defined in common law as the breaking and entering of the dwelling house of another at night with the intent of committing a felony. LaFave, Criminal Law, Section 21.1, 1017. The modern offense has been broadly expanded in most states. The nighttime elements have been dropped, and the locale extended, in some cases to include motor vehicles.
National Research Council, “Public Perceptions and Reactions to Violent Offending and Victimization,” 1994, Understanding and Preventing Violence, Volume 4: Consequences and Control (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press), 18.
National Research Council, “Public Perceptions and Reactions,” 19.
John Gramlich, “Voters’ Perceptions of Crime Continue to Conflict with Reality,” Pew Research Center, November 16, 2016, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/16/voters-perceptions-of-crime-continue-to-conflict-with-reality/.
Terence McArdle, “The ‘Law and Order’ Campaign that Won Richard Nixon the White House 50 Years Ago,” Washington Post, November 5, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/11/05/law-order-campaign-that-won-richard-nixon-white-house-years-ago/; Rachel Withers, “George H.W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” Ad Will Always be the Reference Point for Dog-Whistle Racism,” VOX, December 1, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/12/1/18121221/george-hw-bush-willie-horton-dog-whistle-politics; David Nakamura and Peter Hermann, “After Announcing Modest Police Reforms, Trump Pivots Quickly to a Law-and-Order Message in Appeal to His Base,” Washington Post, June 26, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/after-announcing-modest-police-reforms-trump-pivots-quickly-to-a-law-and-order-message-in-appeal-to-his-base/2020/06/26/622c6688-b7b6-11ea-a8da-693df3d7674a_story.html.
New York Times transcript, “Ahmaud Arbery’s Final Minutes.”
Schrade, “Police Enlisted Suspect’s Help.”
Schrade, “Police Enlisted Suspect’s Help.”
Fausset, “Suspect in Arbery Shooting Offered to Help.”
Fausset, “Suspect in Arbery Shooting Offered to Help.”
Schrade, “Police Enlisted Suspect’s Help.”
Fitz-Gibbon, “Man who Filmed Ahmaud Arbery Shooting.”
Glynn County Police Department, “Public Release Incident Report.”
Hutchinson and Katz, “Ahmaud Arbery was Struck by Vehicle.”
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, reproduced in Three African-American Classics (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2007), 259.
Tucker, “Racial Slur Shocks Hearing.”
Fitz-Gibbon, “Man who Filmed Ahmaud Arbery Shooting.”
New York Times transcript, “Ahmaud Arbery’s Final Minutes.”
Boone, “GBI: Arbery’s Killer Uttered Racial Epithet.”
Boone, “GBI: Arbery’s Killer Uttered Racial Epithet”; Tucker, “Racial Slur Shocks Hearing”; Italiano and Fitz-Gibbon, “Travis McMichael Allegedly Yelled Racial Slur.”
Glynn County Police Department, “Public Release Incident Report.”
Rojas, Fausset and Kovaleski, “Georgia Killing Puts Spotlight on a Police Force’s Troubled History.”
Christian Boone and Brad Schrade, “State Guidelines Ignored by Prosecutors in Arbery Death Probe,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 29, 2020, https://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/state-guidelines-ignored-prosecutors-arbery-death-probe/tELbrJObvVhaVUQrqy9jHI/; Wilkinson, “Ahmaud Arbery Was the Victim.”
Boone and Schrade, “State Guidelines Ignored by Prosecutors.”
Boone and Schrade, “State Guidelines Ignored by Prosecutors”; Katheryn Tucker, “DAs Who Passed on Prosecution in Arbery Case Now Being Investigated,” Law.Com Daily Report, May 15, 2020, https://www.law.com/dailyreportonline/2020/05/15/das-who-passed-on-prosecution-in-arbery-case-now-being-investigated/?slreturn=20200521133305.
Boone and Schrade, “State Guidelines Ignored by Prosecutors.”
Brice-Saddler, Itkowitz, and Wootson, “Father and Son Charged in the Killing of Black Georgia Jogger”; Boone and Schrade, “State Guidelines Ignored by Prosecutors.”
Letter from George E. Barnhill, April 2, 2020.
National District Attorneys Association, “NDAA Statement on District Attorney Recusal and Comments on Ahmaud Arbery Case,” May 9, 2020, https://ndaa.org/ndaa-statement-on-district-attorney-recusal-and-comments-on-ahmaud-arbery-case/.
Boone and Schrade, “State Guidelines Ignored by Prosecutors.”
Carrie Teegardin, “Jury Quickly Says ‘Not Guilty’ in Georgia Elections Case,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 15, 2018, https://www.ajc.com/blog/investigations/jury-quickly-says-not-guilty-georgia-elections-case/uxbnZO4AUxmBQfTmVGZjXK/; Samantha Michaels, “He Didn’t File Charges in the Arbery Case. But He Spent Years Accusing a Black Grandma of Voter Fraud,” Mother Jones, May 9, 2020, https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/05/ahmaud-arbery-georgia-jogger-george-barnhill-olivia-pearson-voter-fraud-charges/; Joel Anderson, “The District Attorney Who Saw ‘No Grounds for Arrest’ in the Killing of Ahmaud Arbery Has a History,” Slate, May 9, 2020, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/ahmaud-arbery-george-barnhill-olivia-pearson.html.
Griff Witte and Michael Brice-Saddler, “Georgia Grand Jury Indicts Three Men in Killing of Ahmaud Arbery,” Washington Post, June 24, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/georgia-ahmaud-arbery-indictment-murder/2020/06/24/e9aac6bc-b668-11ea-aca5-ebb63d27e1ff_story.html.