“That one minute represents a fraction of the time Ahmaud Arbery ran in Satilla Shores,” Walmsley said, before falling silent.
The pursuit of Arbery lasted about five minutes, the judge said as soon as he started talking again, as father and son Gregory and Travis McMichael and their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan Jr. the 25-year-old black man haunted their neighborhood outside of Brunswick, Georgia.
The men believed Arbery had committed a crime in their neighborhood, they told police. The McMichaels were armed and gave chase, and Bryan later joined the chase and recorded it from his pickup. Bryan’s video shows Travis McMichael exiting his truck and confronting Arbery, who struggles with Travis over a shotgun before the younger McMichael fatally shoots him.
“I do want to put that period in context, and the only way I could do that might be a little theatrical, but I think it’s appropriate,” Walmsley told the court. “I want us all to get a sense of time. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to sit still for a minute.”
Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, bowed her head during the silence, according to a polar reporter who attended the courtroom. The silence was broken only by the sound of journalists typing, the reporter said.
“When I thought about this, I thought from many different angles,” Walmsley said, “and I kept coming back to the fear that must have been in the mind of the young man running through Satilla Shores.”
Walmsley sentenced Travis McMichael and Gregory McMichael to life without parole. He sentenced Bryan to life with the option of parole. Bryan will be eligible for parole under Georgian law only after serving 30 years in prison for being convicted of serious violent crimes.
The two-and-a-half-week selection process ended in mid-November with prosecutors accusing defense attorneys of disproportionately beating qualified black jurors and basing some of their attacks on race.
While he ultimately ruled that the case could go ahead because the defense could provide “valid reasons, beyond race, for why the jurors were fired,” Walmsley said, “this court has determined that there appears to have been intentional discrimination.”
Eliott C. McLaughlin of DailyExpertNews contributed to this report.