Ahmaud Arbery, the Law and Legacy of Violence Against Black Bodies

On February 23, 2020, another young black man was gunned down, this time in Georgia.

“It’s easy for us to say that this is the same thing as a lynching attended by hundreds of people in the 30’s. It’s actually not. This is a very different moment.” — Lester Spence, Johns Hopkins University

His name was Ahmaud Arbery, and he was running down a street in the middle of the day when two white men in a parked pickup truck shot him and ended his life at just 25 years old. Gregory and Travis McMichael were arrested following a wave of public outcry two months after the deadly shooting had taken place. 

Listen: How America’s history of violence and racism led to Ahmaud Arbery’s death.

Guests

Jake Neher/WDET

Lester Spence, Professor of Political Science and Africana studies at Johns Hopkins University, says he never watched the widely publicized video of Arbery’s killing.

“I don’t need to see it to know what is going to happen,” says Spence.

He says it’s important to consider tragedies like Arbery’s killing in a contemporary context.

“It’s easy for us to say that this is the same thing as a lynching attended by hundreds of people in the 30’s. It’s actually not. This is a very different moment,” says Spence. This new moment, Spence says, is the closest thing to the Civil War since the 1950’s. Spence says right now almost everything is up for grabs and the public response needs to meet this new moment.

Eve Brensike Primus, Professor of Law and Director of the Public Defender Training Institute at the University of Michigan Law School, says based on the evidence presented in the killing of Arbery, the oft-cited self-defense law doesn’t protect the actions of the McMichaels that day.

“You can’t shoot to kill for a non-violent felony. — Eve Brensike Primus, University of Michigan

“What is obvious is that it was the McMichaels, who had weapons, who approached Mr. Arbery, who initiated contact… [self-defense] is not a viable claim,” says Primus.

She adds that the law doesn’t protect their claims of a citizen’s arrest either, an assertion they made based off of hearsay. Even if Arbery did commit a crime, Primus says, the amount of force that the perpetrators used would’ve been constitutionally unreasonable for even police officers. “You can’t shoot to kill for a non-violent felony,” says Primus.

She says specific laws, law enforcement, politics and culture are all plagued by implicit biases toward black men and are in need of reform.