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D.A. in Ahmaud Arbery Case Faces Charges of Police Interference

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On Wednesday in Georgia, prosecutors began calling witnesses for the criminal-misconduct trial of former District Attorney Jackie Johnson, who was coastal Glynn County’s top prosecutor when Ahmaud Arbery was killed nearly five years ago after he was chased down by three white men who saw him jogging in their neighborhood, the AP reports. The first witness was police investigator Roderic Nohilly, who told Travis McMichael, the man who shot Arbery, that he wasn’t being arrested. “You’re going home today,” Nohilly told McMichael roughly two hours after the shooting on Feb. 23, 2020. No one was charged in Arbery’s killing until more than two months later, when cellphone video of the shooting leaked online and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case from local police. Travis McMichael and his father, Greg McMichael, were then arrested along with a neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan. All three were later convicted of murder as well as federal hate crimes.


Now, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s office is prosecuting Johnson on charges that she violated her oath of office and interfered with police investigating Arbery’s killing, by delaying arrests and influencing the appointment of an outside prosecutor who had decided Arbery was killed in self-defense. Greg McMichael had worked for Johnson as an investigator and left a voicemail on her cellphone asking for help an hour after the killing. Johnson insists she did nothing wrong and immediately recused her office. She says that she reached out to a neighboring district attorney, George E. Barnhill, who advised police the day after that the shooting appeared to be justified. Prosecutors say Johnson violated her oath of office, a felony, by recommending that the attorney general appoint Barnhill to oversee the investigation into Arbery’s death without disclosing that Barnhill had already concluded the shooting wasn’t a crime.

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