Attorneys for the three white men who chased and killed Ahmaud Arbery on Feb. 23, 2020 in a Georgia subdivision asked a federal appeals court Wednesday to throw out their hate crime convictions, arguing that prosecutors relied on their history of racist comments without proving they targeted Arbery because he was Black, the Associated Press reports. “At the end of the day, this issue isn’t about the racism of these defendants,” A.J. Balbo, representing Greg McMichael, told a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. “It’s about whether or not the government met its burden.”
Federal prosecutors countered that the trial jury in 2022 heard sufficient evidence to find the trio -- father and son Greg and Travis McDaniel and neighbor William "Roddie" Bryan - guilty of hate crimes as well as attempted kidnapping. The men believed mistakenly that Arbery was a fleeing criminal because of racist views, evidenced by the men’s prior text messages and social media posts, prosecutors said. “The hate-fueled violence the defendants inflicted on Ahmaud is precisely the type of conduct that Congress targeted when it passed the Civil Rights Act,” said Brant Levine, an attorney for the Justice Department’s civil rights division. The McDaniels armed themselves with guns and used a pickup truck to chase Arbery after spotting Arbery, 25, running in their neighborhood. Bryan joined the pursuit in his own truck and recorded cellphone video of Travis McMichael shooting Arbery at close range with a shotgun.