11 white people and one Black man -- that’s the racial makeup of the jury selected for the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, approved by Glynn County Superior Court Judge Timothy R. Walmsley last Wednesday.
Early 2020, 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was murdered at the hands of three white co-conspirers while he was out jogging in his suburban Georgia neighborhood. Video of Arbery’s death was leaked not long after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis and right before Breonna Taylor was murdered by Louisville police. The world was enraged, taking the movement for Black lives, abolition, and anti-racism to an international stage.
Now, more than a year after Arbery's death, the opening statements in the trial of Travis McMichael, his father Gregory, and their neighbor William Bryan who are accused of killing Arbery has just begun. The outcome of the jury selection process has demonstrated nothing more than an ongoing pattern in the racist legacy of the American justice system. 14-year-old Emmett Till’s murderers were acquitted at the hands of an all-white jury back in 1955. 17-year-old Trayvon Martin’s murderer was acquitted at the hands of a predominantly-white jury (five of six total jurors being white) in 2013. Racial discrimination in the jury selection process is a well-studied, widely-observed, ongoing issue.
Attorney Ben Crump, left, and Marcus Arbery Sr., the father of Ahmaud Arbery, second from left, arriving at the Glynn County courthouse on October 18th, 2021; Sean Rayford/Getty Images
According to reports verified by the New York Times, Linda Dunikoski, a special prosecutor from the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office, attempted to challenge the defense attorneys’ removal of eight potential Black jurors, referencing a Supreme Court ruling that specifically prohibits racial discrimination in the selection of jurors.
To this, Judge Timothy R. Walmsley admitted that “quite a few African American jurors were excused through peremptory strikes executed by the defense” and acknowledged “intentional discrimination in the panel." Yet, he eventually ruled that for each of the eight potential jurors, the defense had provided a “legitimate, nondiscriminatory, clear, reasonably specific, and related” reason for why the juror could not be seated.
“This has been the strangest jury selection process I have ever seen,” Lee Merritt, a lawyer for the Arbery family, has commented. “There’s very few people who wouldn’t have heard about this case. Most have developed an opinion about the case, so I understand that the attorneys, in general, will have some questions that we’re not used to.” However, he proceeded to describe that the defense lawyers were “badgering” potential jurors in their screening.
It should be noted that the jury selection process for the trial for Ahmaud Arbery’s murder lasted two and a half weeks, compared to the jury selection process leading up to the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two men and injured another with a firearm at a Wisconsin protest last summer. It took one day to seat that jury.