Slavery-era Georgia law is key defense argument in trial over Ahmaud Arbery's killing - Yahoo News
By Rich McKay and Jonathan Allen
(Reuters) - A pivotal defense argument of the three white men on trial in Georgia for killing Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger, is that they were trying to make a citizen's arrest under a Civil War-era law that was later repealed amid an uproar over the shooting.
When the fatal encounter occurred on Feb. 23, 2020, it was legal in Georgia for people to arrest someone where they had "reasonable and probable grounds of suspicion" that the person had just committed a felony. Outcry over the killing led to lawmakers revoking the statute in May.
Legal observers say prosecutors will seek to convince the jury that there was no felony over which to arrest Arbery, 25, and that the three men lacked the "reasonable and probable suspicion" required under the old citizen's arrest law. The trial is in the second week of jury selection.
Before Arbery's killing, the law had been largely unchanged since it was codified in 1863, when Georgia was part of the slaveholding Southern Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War.
Most U.S. states have codified some form of a law allowing citizen's arrests. The American Civil Liberties Union and others that successfully sought to repeal the law said the state's statute was originally passed to enable the capture of escaped slaves.
Chris Slobogin, a law professor at Tennessee's Vanderbilt University, said citizen's arrest laws put dangerous powers in untrained hands.
"Things can get out of control quickly," he said.
Travis McMichael, 35, his father, Gregory McMichael, 65, and their neighbor William "Roddie" Bryan, 52, say they suspected Arbery was a burglar and chased him in two pickup trucks as he ran down a street in mostly white Satilla Shores, a suburb of the small coastal city of Brunswick.
source: https://news.yahoo.com/slavery-era-georgia-law-key-100650245.html
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