BRUNSWICK, GA –
The white man who fatally shot Ahmaud Arberry after chasing the 25-year-old black man through a Georgia neighborhood was sentenced Monday to life in prison for committing a federal hate crime.
Travis McMichael was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Lisa Godby Wood in the port city of Brunswick. His sentence is largely symbolic because McMichael was sentenced earlier this year to life in prison without parole in Georgia state court for Arbury’s murder.
Wood said McMichael received a “fair trial.”
“And it’s not lost on the court that this was the kind of trial Ahmaud Arbery didn’t get before he was shot and killed,” the judge said.
She spoke with members of Arbury’s family before sentencing. His mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said she feels every shot fired at her son every day.
“It’s so unfair, so unfair, so unfair that he was killed when he didn’t even commit a crime,” she said.
McMichael declined to speak in court, but his attorney, Amy Copeland, said her client had no prior convictions for Arbury’s murder and had served in the U.S. Coast Guard. She called for a lighter sentence.
McMichael was one of three defendants convicted in February of federal hate crime charges. His father, Greg McMichael, and neighbor William “Roddy” Bryan had sentencing hearings scheduled for later Monday.
The McMichaels armed themselves with guns and used a pickup truck to chase after Arbury after he drove past their home on February 23, 2020. Brian joined the chase in his own truck and recorded cellphone video of McMichael blasting Arbury with rifle as Arbury strikes and grabs the weapon.
The McMichaels told police they suspected Arbury was a thief. Investigators determined that he was unarmed and committed no crimes.
Arberry’s killing became part of a larger national reckoning over racial injustice and the killings of unarmed black men, including George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breona Taylor in Kentucky. Those two cases also resulted in federal charges being filed by the Department of Justice.
Wood scheduled back-to-back hearings Monday to individually sentence each of the defendants, starting with Travis McMichael, who killed Arbury with a shotgun after a street chase initiated by his father and joined by a neighbor, who is also white.
Greg McMichael and Bryan also face possible life sentences after a jury convicted them in February of federal hate crimes, concluding they violated Arbury’s civil rights and targeted him because of his race. All three men were also found guilty of attempted kidnapping, and the McMichaels face additional penalties for using a firearm to commit a violent crime.
A state Supreme Court judge sentenced all three men to life in January for Arberry’s murder, with both McMichaels denied any chance of parole.
All three defendants remain in the coastal Glynn County jail, in the custody of U.S. Marshals, pending sentencing following their federal convictions in January.
Because they were first charged and convicted of murder in state court, protocol would have turned them over to the Georgia Department of Corrections to serve their life sentences in state prison.
In court filings last week, both Travis and Greg McMichael asked the judge to instead transfer them to a federal prison, saying they would not be safe in a Georgia prison system that is the subject of a U.S. Justice Department investigation focused on on violence between prisoners.
Copeland said during Monday’s hearing for Travis McMichael that her client received hundreds of threats that he would be killed as soon as he arrived at the state prison and that his photo was circulated there on illegal phones.
“I am concerned, your honor, that my client is facing a backdoor death sentence,” she said, adding that “retribution and revenge” are not sentencing factors, even for a defendant who is “publicly reviled.”
Arbury’s family demanded that Travis McMichael serve his sentence in a state prison. His father, Marcus Arbury Sr., said Travis McMichael showed no mercy to his son and deserves to “rot in state prison.”
Wood said she did not have the authority to order the state to turn custody of Travis McMichael over to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, but she was also reluctant to do so in his case.
During the February hate crime trial, prosecutors bolstered their case that Arbury’s killing was racially motivated by showing the jury about two dozen text messages and social media posts in which Travis McMichael and Brian used racial slurs and made disparaging comments about black people.
Defense attorneys for the three men argued that McMichaels and Bryan did not persecute Arbury because of his race, but acted on a serious — if mistaken — suspicion that Arbury had committed crimes in their neighborhood.
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