Three men have been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery.
The Georgia judge sentenced three men, all white, to life in prison for the murder of a Black man who was running through the predominantly white neighborhood in February 2020 when they chased him down and murdered him.
Ahmaud Arbery was out for a jog and was forced to run for his life for five minutes as white men chased him down in pickup trucks that cornered him. The presiding judge, Timothy Walmsley said that he thought about the case from every angle, and kept coming back to the fact that Arbery must have felt “terror” “running through Satilla Shores.”
His mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said that this was not a case of mistaken identity or mistaken fact, but that the killers chose to target Ahmaud because they specifically did not want him in their neighborhood. She said in her statement after the sentencing that they chose to treat him differently, and when they could not scare him, they killed him.
Under a Georgia state law, murder holds a life sentence for killers, unless prosecutors specifically seek the death penalty.
Ahmaud’s father said that when he closed his eyes, he envisioned his son’s execution, and would forever be scared with that as his vision. He said that his son’s killers lynched him in broad daylight, and killed him while he did what he loved: running.
Prosecutors asked for a life sentence for the killers without parole.
Ahmaud’s murder went almost unnoticed until videos emerged online almost two months after his killing. It led to a national, and international, demand for justice. All three men involved with his death were arrested when this happened by the Georgia Bureau of investigation.
Civil rights experts and attorneys have said that the brutal crimes against Ahmaud cannot be in vain and that the country had originally gone unpublished and without justice due to deep states of corruption and also institutionalized racism.
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