World News: It was a modern-day lynching

Wednesday, November 24

Prosecution and defense provided closing arguments in Ahmaud Arbery case

Ahmaud Arbery was the victim of a modern-day lynching

Here's what we have for today:

Today's newsletter features several voices on the verdict of the Ahmaud Arbery trial. A jury found all three men guilty. We're leading with an editorial about the racism that led to his death.

Our View: Ahmaud Arbery was the victim of a modern-day lynching

By The Editorial Board

The NAACP defines lynching as "the public killing of an individual who has not received any due process ... acts that white people used to terrorize and control Black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the South."

That remains shamefully true in this second decade of the 21st century.

Three white men who carried out the shotgun killing of a Black jogger in Georgia last year were convicted by a jury of murder. But let's not kid ourselves. The death of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery bore the savage traits of a lynching.

Today's Editorial Cartoon

Nathaniel Archer, USA TODAY Network

USA TODAY Network

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Jury finds Ahmaud Arbery's murderers guilty. But the racist defense arguments still sting.

By Njeri Mathis Rutledge and Geoffrey S. Corn

There's an old saying in the courtroom that when the law is against you hammer on the facts, when the facts are against you hammer on the law, but when both are against you hammer on the table. This week, a defense attorney for the men who killed Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia chose to pull out a different hammer to distract from both the facts and the law: the racist hammer.

Yet, by its guilty verdict Wednesday, the jury rejected the defense's obvious efforts to exploit what it hoped would be the racial undercurrent.

Instead, the jury did its duty and followed the law by answering "no" to the critical legal question: whether the three defendants, Greg McMichael, Travis McMichael and William "Roddie" Bryan validly engaged in a citizen's arrest that led to a justifiable use of deadly force against Ahmaud Arbery?

They did not, and as a result, all three men were found guilty of felony murder. They must be accountable for the unlawful killing of this innocent victim.

I was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. We need to do more to help exonerees.

By Sunny Jacobs

I was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death for murder in 1976. At the time, I was a young mother, wife, daughter, and I was 27 years old. It took 17 years to prove my innocence.

By then, I was a widow, an orphan, a grandmother, and I was 45 years old. My two children, who were 9 years and 10 months old when I was incarcerated, grew up without me and went into foster care when my parents were killed in a plane crash.

My husband was executed on death row 2 1/2 years before the proof of our innocence was revealed.

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