Update: The jury in the Ahmaud Arbery case continued its deliberations Wednesday and asked to watch two versions of the video of Travis McMichael shooting the 25-year-old Black man. The jury foreperson asked the judge if they could watch the original cellphone video and a version enhanced to reduce shadows three times each, CNN reports. The jury returned to the Georgia courtroom to watch the videos and listen to a 911 call father Greg McMichael made from a pickup truck around 30 seconds before the shooting, reports the AP. "There's a Black male running down the street," he told the operator in the Feb. 23, 2020 call. Gunshots were heard after he shouted, "Stop right there! Damn it, stop! Travis!" Our original story from Tuesday follows:
The case of three white men charged with murder in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery went to a jury Tuesday after a 13-day trial in which prosecutors argued the defendants provoked a confrontation with the 25-year-old Black man and defense attorneys said their clients acted in self-defense. “You can’t claim self-defense if you are the unjustified aggressor,” Linda Dunikoski told jurors in her final closing arguments, per the AP. “Who started this? It wasn’t Ahmaud Arbery.”
The prosecution gets the final word because it carries the burden of proving its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Prosecutors and defense attorneys spent hours on Monday delivering closing arguments that spilled into a second day. Dunikoski spent two hours Tuesday morning hammering at defense attorneys’ attempts to blame Arbery for his own death. The defense attorneys said Arbery lashed out violently with his fists to resist a lawful citizen’s arrest by the defendants. But Dunikoski said Arbery's pursuers had “no badge, no uniform, no authority," adding, “You can’t make a citizen’s arrest because someone’s running down the street and you have no idea what they did wrong."
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Father and son Greg and Travis McMichael grabbed guns and pursued Arbery in a pickup truck after seeing Arbery running in their neighborhood in the Georgia port city of Brunswick in February 2020. Neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan recorded cellphone video as he joined the pursuit. All three defendants are white. A nine-count indictment charges all three with one count of malice murder, four counts of felony murder, two counts of aggravated assault, one count of false imprisonment, and one count of criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment. (More Ahmaud Arbery stories.)
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