Such laws, which allow redundant prosecutions based on defendants’ bigoted beliefs, supposedly are authorized by the amendment that banned slavery.
The three white men who killed Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black jogger, after chasing him in pickup trucks through a suburban neighborhood near Brunswick, Georgia, were convicted today of federal «hate crimes.» The jury concluded that Gregory McMichael, who initiated the chase; his son, Travis McMichael, who killed Arbery with a shotgun; and William Bryan, who joined the chase in his own pickup truck, had pursued and assaulted Arbery «because of» his «race and color.» That violation of 18 USC 245 is punishable by life in prison. But since all three defendants are already serving life sentences in state prison for murdering Arbery, the federal convictions won’t have any practical effect on their punishment. Gregory and Travis McMichael are not eligible for parole, and Bryan won’t be eligible until his early 80s, assuming he is still alive. The point of this second trial was to «send the message that the Justice Department won’t tolerate this type of racist hatred,» as a former federal prosecutor put it in an interview with The Washington Post. The prosecution presented evidence that the defendants had repeatedly expressed racist sentiments in the months and years before they killed Arbery. Without contradicting that evidence, the defense argued that the three men were motivated not by racism but by their suspicion that Arbery, who had repeatedly visited a house under construction in the neighborhood, was engaged in criminal activity. The jury evidently surmised that Travis McMichael et al. would not have viewed Arbery as a criminal suspect if he had been white. Assuming that’s true, they responded to him the way they did «because of» his race. But since the opinions they had expressed were crucial to the prosecution’s case, it is equally true that the defendants were convicted «because of» their benighted beliefs.
