Three white men who chased and killed Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old innocent man in the US State of Georgia have been sentenced to life in prison.
A judge in Georgia sentenced them to life in prison, with two having no chance of parole. Under Georgia law murder gets carries a mandatory life sentence unless the death penalty is sought by prosecutors.
The trial was driven by graphic video of the armed men following Arbery as he ran through their neighbourhood, suspecting with no evidence that he might have been a robber. The video, taken by Bryan, shows Arbery trying to avoid them and then Travis McMichael eventually confronting and shooting him with a shotgun.
The killing on 23 February, 2020 became part of a larger national reckoning on racial injustice when the video was posted online two months later.
The judge agreed with prosecutors and Arbery’s relatives that the three men, who are white, had “assumed the worst” about Arbery, who he said was “hunted down and shot, and he was killed because individuals here in this courtroom took the law into their own hands.”
Earlier, Arbery’s family told the court they believed that racial stereotyping led to the killing of the avid jogger, who grew up and still lived across the highway from the Satilla Shores neighborhood where he died.
The mother of Ahmaud Arbery applauded the sentencing, saying that she never lost faith that justice would be done.
“I knew that we would come out with a victory. I never doubted it and I knew that today would come,” Wanda Cooper-Jones said at a press conference outside of the courtroom.