A new life sentence for the murderers of the young African-American, Ahmaud Arbery, in February 2020. After the justice of the state of Georgia, it is the federal justice which pronounced this Monday.
With our correspondent in Washington, Guillaume Naudin
This is one of the peculiarities of the American legal system: the possibility of serving several prison sentences for a single crime. After their sentence to life imprisonment without possible adjustment by the Georgian justice, the McMichaels, father and son, are again sentenced to life imprisonment, this time for the hateful character of their crime. With the help of a neighbor who gets an additional 35 years after an initial 30-year sentence, they chased and killed Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old African-American who was jogging.
Convicts will remain in a Georgia state prison
So it doesn’t change much for the culprits, except that they had asked, during this trial, to be able to serve their sentence in a federal prison and not a Georgia State prison for security reasons. The lawyer for Travis McMichael, the son who pulled the trigger on the gun provided by his father, explains that his client has received hundreds of death threats. According to her, he risks a disguised death sentence by self-proclaimed vigilantes. Even acknowledging the irony of the situation, she did not convince the judge who left the three men in their Georgia penitentiary.
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