Former Georgia prosecutor and District Attorney Jackie Johnson, charged with obstructing justice in the cases against the now convicted killers of Ahmaud Arbery will appear in a Brunswick County court this Tuesday morning for jury selection in her impending trial for criminal misconduct and hindering a police investigation in the 2020 death of the 20 year-old jogger who was shot and killed by white vigilantes with connections to the prosecutor’s office and who claimed at the time that they were informally deputized and encouraged to patrol their bedroom community neighborhood and allowed to make citizen’s arrests of people they suspected of wrong doing.
The men at the center of the criminal case, Travis McMichael, his father Greg McMichael and William Bryan were found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to life plus 10 years in prison in the federal hate crimes trial for the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in 2022.Their neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan also received a 420-month sentence for federal hate crime on Monday.
The trio of killers was sentenced to life sentences in a Georgia State Court in January of 2022 for killing the 25-year-old black jogger.
The sentencing in the federal trial is seen as largely symbolic in that all three have already received life sentences, but face additional life sentences to demonstrate the heinousness of their racist views which lead to the death of the young Brunswick man.
The elder McMichael, a retired investigator reportedly called DA Johnson an hour after the killing to inform her that he and his son needed to speak with her immediately as they had just fatally shot Arbery. Prosecutors now say that Jackson abused her office when she intervened on behalf of McMichael’s and his son, delaying the investigation for several months and directing Brunswick County law enforcement officials not to arrest the McMichaels.
A grand jury indicted the men on federal hate crime charges in April of 2021, as prosecutors and defense lawyers sought to have a larger jury pool for the trial. However, jury selection in the state murder trial was hampered and made headlines after a slow, and admittedly discriminatory process shadowed proceedings.
During the victim’s impact statements for consideration in the sentencing portion of the case, Wanda Cooper-Jones, Ahmaud Arbery’s mother referenced the shameful remarks from another attorney, defense attorney Laure Hogue for making “beyond rude” remarks about her late son’s toenails, saying they were long and dirty.
“Turning Ahmaud Arbery into a victim after the choices he made, does not reflect the reality of what brought Ahmaud Arbery to Satilla Shores in his khaki shorts, with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails,” Hogue said in her closing arguments on Nov. 22, 2022.
“I wish he would have cut and cleaned his toenails that day. I guess he would have if he had known that he was going to be killed that day,” said Cooper-Jones.
Johnson’s trial is expected to last for several weeks as the former district attorney who was voted out of office in 2020 continues to blame her political defeat on the Ahmaud Arbery case.
