Ahmaud Arbery Killers’ Hate-Crimes Trial Likely to Proceed

(Bloomberg) -- A judge on Monday rejected a plea deal made by the U.S. Department of Justice that would have averted a federal hate-crime trial against Travis and Gregory McMichael, two of the three White men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery in 2020. Their neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, who was also convicted, did not reach a deal and will face trial next Monday.

U.S. District Judge Lisa G. Wood said the McMichaels have until Feb. 4 to decide whether to plead guilty to federal hate crimes charges without the deal or go to trial as planned on Monday.

The Arbery case led to changes in Georgia's criminal law and prompted the passage of the state's first hate-crimes law in 2020, amid nationwide protests and growing concern over how the U.S. handles racially motivated crimes.

The number of hate crimes reported annually grew to 7,753 in 2020 the FBI said, the highest in 12 years and an increase of 6.1% from 2019. These numbers are likely an undercount for a variety of reasons, including the nature by which prosecutors classify hate crimes, the reluctance some communities might feel in reporting incidents to police, as well as the fact that over 3,000 law enforcement agencies did not contribute their crime statistics to the FBI's 2020 report.

Historically, only a fraction of the hate crimes reported each year are brought to trial, but when they are, prosecutors are overwhelmingly successful in securing convictions, data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics show.

Between 2005 and 2019, federal judicial districts referred 1,864 hate crime suspects for prosecution to U.S. attorneys, according to a July 2021 report. Those offices declined to prosecute 1,548 of those cases. Of the 310 defendants who were charged with hate crimes in the 15-year span, a total of 284 defendants, or 92%, were convicted.

The most common reason that U.S. attorneys cited when declining to prosecute a hate crime was a lack of sufficient evidence. Between 2015 and 2019, 63% of cases were not investigated due to insufficient evidence.

Sarah Vinson, a forensic psychiatrist and the founder of Lorio Forensics in Atlanta, Georgia, said these numbers can have a discouraging effect. “It makes you question if they're just taking this sort of low-hanging fruit and not doing as much as they could to really go after these cases,” she said.

Before the plea deal was struck down in the McMichaels case, a federal agent testified that plenty of evidence of Travis McMichael's racism was uncovered in their investigation, including racist remarks perpetuating stereotypes about Black people on social-media, and posts that used the n-word.

The McMichaels had been sentenced to life in prison, but the DOJ's proposed plea deal would have limited the time the McMichaels spent in federal prison to 30 years. Arbery's mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, had asked the judge to reject the plea deal, saying the McMichaels were strategically pleading guilty to avoid state prison. Prosecutors said a condition of the deal was that the McMichaels would have to admit they targeted Arbery on the basis of his race.