How about that?
After the disappointment of the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict in Wisconsin last week, it was a wonderful surprise to see Georgia come through in the name of justice in the Ahmaud Arbery case.
Three white men were convicted of murder for shooting and killing a black jogger by a jury on which 11 of 12 members were white. All this in a case that local district attorneys in Brunswick Ga., refused even to prosecute for 74 days.
If there was a great irony in it all, it’s that one of the killers had shot a cellphone video that he thought would justify the shooting of Arbery. It turned out that the video was the biggest and best evidence for convicting the three killers.
Things really have changed in the South. Brunswick is about as far from urban, modern Georgia — read Atlanta — as is possible. When the local DA refused to prosecute the three mean who killed Arbery, it wasn’t really any great surprise. In the Jim Crow era in the Deep South, it wasn’t at all uncommon for young black men to be killed for very minor offenses.
What was uncommon was for the young white men who killed them ever to stand trial.
That’s why it was a shocking throwback to worse times when the local DA declined even to prosecute the crime. It says something that she is now under indictment for that lack of action.
It may be ironic, but what got the defendants tried — and probably convicted as well — was a cellphone video taken by one of the killers, He released it to justify their actions, but public reaction to it had exactly the opposite effect.
At least Trumpanzees don’t seem to be reacting to this trial the way they did to the acquittal of Wisconsin killer Kyle Rittenhouse. Maybe in at least this one case, black lives do matter.
Or at least one black life matters.
Did someone really call 911 to say a black man was running down the street … in the middle of the day?
Did a white guy with a shotgun really empty it into the chest of a black man … by shooting him three times?
Yes and yes, but an almost lily-white jury convicted all three men involved of felony murder, and convicted the man who actually did the murder with an additional charge of murder with malice. There is at least a possibility all three men will spend the rest of their lives in prison.
Yes, it’s only one case, only one time in which jurors spoke strongly for justice.
But it matters.
God almighty, it matters.’