The white man who fatally shot Ahmaud Arbery after chasing the 25-year-old black man through a Georgia neighborhood was sentenced Monday to life in prison for committing a federal hate crime. Travis McMichael was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Lisa Godby Wood in Brunswick Harbor. His punishment is largely symbolic, as McMichael was sentenced earlier this year to life without parole in a Georgia state court for Arberry’s murder. Wood said McMichael had received a “fair trial”. “And it’s not lost on the court that it was the kind of trial that Ahmaud Arberi didn’t get before he was shot and killed,” the judge said. Before sentencing, he heard from members of Arbery’s family. His mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said she feels every shot that hit her son every day. “It’s so unfair, so unfair, so unfair that he was killed when he wasn’t even committing a crime,” he said. McMichael declined to address the court, but his attorney, Amy Cowland, said her client had no prior convictions for Arberry’s murder and had served in the U.S. Coast Guard. He asked for a lighter sentence. McMichael was one of three defendants convicted in February of federal hate crime charges. His father, Greg McMichael, and neighbor William “Rhody” Bryan had sentencing hearings scheduled for later Monday. The McMichaels armed themselves with guns and used a truck to chase after Arbery after he ran past their home on February 23, 2020. Bryan joined the chase in his own truck and recorded cellphone video of McMichael blasting Arbery with a shotgun as Arbery threw punches and grabbed the gun. The McMichaels told police they suspected Arbery was a burglar. Investigators determined he was unarmed and had committed no crime. Arbery’s killing became part of a broader national reckoning on racial injustice and the killings of unarmed black people, including George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky. Those two cases also resulted in the Department of Justice bringing federal charges. Wood scheduled back-to-back hearings Monday to sentence each of the defendants separately, starting with Travis McMichael, who killed Arbery with a shotgun after a chase started by his father and joined by a neighbor, who is also white. Greg McMichael and Bryan also face possible life sentences after a jury convicted them in February of federal hate crimes, concluding they violated Arberry’s civil rights and targeted him because of his race. All three men were also found guilty of attempted kidnapping, and the McMichaels face additional penalties for using firearms to commit a violent crime. A state Superior Court judge sentenced all three men to life in prison in January for Arberry’s murder, with the two McMichaels refusing any chance of parole. All three defendants remained jailed in coastal Glynn County, in the custody of U.S. marshals, awaiting sentencing following their federal convictions in January. Because they were first charged and convicted of murder in state court, protocol would have them turned over to the Georgia Department of Corrections to serve their life sentences in state prison. In a court hearing last week, both Travis and Greg McMichael asked a judge to divert them to a federal prison, saying they would not be safe in a Georgia prison system that is the subject of a U.S. Department of Justice investigation that focused on violence between prisoners. . Copeland said during Monday’s hearing for Travis McMichael that her client has received hundreds of death threats once he arrives at the state prison and that his picture has been circulated on illegal phones there. “I am concerned your honor that my client is essentially facing the death penalty through the back door,” he said, adding that “retribution and revenge” were not sentencing factors, even for a defendant who is “publicly reviled.” Arbery’s family insisted that Travis McMichael serve his sentence in state prison. His father, Marcus Arbery Sr., said Travis McMichael had shown his son no mercy and that he deserved to “rot in state prison.” Wood said she did not have the authority to order the state to relinquish custody of Travis McMichael to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, but she also was unwilling to do so in his case. During the hate crimes trial in February, prosecutors bolstered their case that Arbery’s killing was racially motivated by showing jurors about a dozen text messages and social media posts in which Travis McMichael and Bryan used racial slurs and made disparaging comments about black people. Defense attorneys for the three men argued that the McMichaels and Bryan did not pursue Arbery because of his race, but acted on a serious — if mistaken — suspicion that Arbery had committed crimes in their neighborhood.
