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In a state that didn’t have a hate-crime law until this year and where vigilante citizens’ arrests were sometimes permitted by the government, three white men are set to go on trial for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man prosecutors allege was “hunted down and ultimately executed” while out for a Sunday jog.
Jury selection begins on Monday in the high-profile case that sparked nationwide protests and sent Georgia lawmakers scrambling to rewrite the state’s statutes. Legal experts say they expect the graphic details of how the 25-year-old Arbery was gunned down to be intertwined with Georgia’s long history of racial unrest.
Lee Merritt and Benjamin Crump, the Arbery family attorneys, have called the killing a “modern-day lynching” and said the accused are now trying to use Georgia’s laws at the time of Arbery’s death to defend their actions.
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According to court documents and evidence presented at previous hearings, the men plan to invoke Georgia’s “citizen’s arrest” statute as a defense, a pre-Civil War-era law that was repealed in May primarily due to the Arbery killing. Kemp called the measure an “antiquated law that is ripe for abuse.”
“The remarkable part of this is that the case that caused the law to change is the one that’s now being tried. That doesn’t happen very often, if ever,” Ronald Carlson, a law professor emeritus at the University of Georgia Law School, told ABC News.
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Article URL : https://abcnews.go.com/US/ahmaud-arbery-murder-case-evoke-georgias-history-race/story?id=80522209