The Ahmaud Arbery Case Didn't Need Wokeness to Achieve Justice

Justice was served in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery on Wednesday. Arbery, a black man, was out jogging on Feb. 23, 2020, when Travis McMichael and his father Greg approached him and attempted a citizen’s arrest because they suspected him of being responsible for break-ins in the neighborhood. An accomplice, Roddie Bryan, tailed the McMichaels and videoed them as the scuffle turned into fatal gunfire.

The shooting and the trial took place in Glynn County on the Georgia coast, and the jury — made up of 11 white people and one black person — convicted all three suspects on various counts, including felony murder.

After the racially fraught year of 2020, it might stand to reason that race would be a factor in the prosecution of this case. After all, when Bryan’s video of the shooting came to light, it ignited a firestorm of controversy, although the George Floyd case and subsequent racially charged shootings stole the limelight from the Arbery case.

Civil rights leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton attended proceedings, and other black pastors made their voices heard throughout the trial — prompting defense attorney Kevin Gough to remark, “We don’t want any more Black pastors coming in here … sitting with the victim’s family, trying to influence the jurors in this case.” (Needless to say, Gough received a rebuke from Judge Timothy Walmsley after what the judge called Gough’s “reprehensible” statement.)

The New York Times mused whether the prosecution in the Ahmaud Arbery case chose not to emphasize race because of the jury makeup. But as Andrew McCarthy pointed out at National Review, the prosecution didn’t bring race into the courtroom because it didn’t need to.

Because the Glynn County district attorney’s office bungled their initial investigation — probably intentionally, the state of Georgia appointed Linda Dunikoski, the district attorney for Cobb County, a suburban area northwest of Atlanta, to serve as a special prosecutor. Dunikoski and her team allowed the case to stand on its own merits in order to convict the McMichaels and Bryan. They also didn’t have proof beyond a reasonable doubt that racial bias was a factor in the shooting, so they didn’t pursue it.

In other words, the prosecution didn’t need to resort to wokeness to ensure that justice was served.

Heck, even Ahmaud Arbery’s father didn’t buy into the woke, race-baiting game:

Father of Ahmaud Arbery just now: “ALL lives matter. I don’t want no daddy to watch his kid get shot down like that. It’s ALL our problem. So let’s keep fighting to make this a better place for all human beings. Love everybody! All human beings need to be treated equally.” ❤️👏🏼👑 pic.twitter.com/PlGwBeMlhU

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) November 24, 2021

Yet the Biden administration is going to shoehorn racial grievance into the case whether anybody wants it or not. The Department of Justice — you know, the folks who brought you “concerned parents are domestic terrorists” — is filing federal civil rights charges against the killers of Ahmaud Arbery.

On the surface, it sounds like merely adding insult to injury — the three men have been convicted at the state level, so what’s the point in adding further charges to the case?

But it’s a far more nefarious thing because these charges assume that the murder was solely about race and nothing else.

McCarthy explains:

Although the civil-rights offenses charged require proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendants murdered Arbery “because of his race [and] color,” and although the Justice Department’s indictment explicitly alleges that they did so “because of Arbery’s race and color,” the indictment does not actually allege any factual basis to believe that the defendants acted against Arbery because of his race.

That is, according to the progressive radicals who run the Biden Civil Rights Division, we are to presume racism because the defendants are white and Arbery was black.

Here’s the thing: the McMichaels allegedly uttered some vile epithets about race before and after killing Ahmaud Arbery, and their targeting of him may have carried with it some assumptions about race. The McMichaels reportedly harbored some racist attitudes. Maybe Bryan too. But the federal charges are simply based on assertions that don’t have proof other than the conclusions that wokeness jumps to every time.

At the end of the day, the murder of Ahmaud Arbery was about vigilante justice and two men who took the law into their own hands. Racism may have been a factor, and it may not have been, but there wasn’t enough proof for the district attorney to use it.

But that doesn’t matter when you’re of the left. To the woke Biden administration, everything is about race.