Sadly, no. They live in a time warp, where black people are required to obey every white whim. Their conduct had nothing to do with good intentions relative to some trespass. Their conduct had only to do with a black man (N) refusing to comply with the verbal commands of whites. The black man refused, so the whites exercised their God given right to kill him. No question, no regret.
Good intentions may have been an excuse to leave their house, but the those intentions ended there.
Let’s say you walk across the road.
Then a bunch of guys come out with guns and trucks and start chasing you, telling you that you jaywalked, and that they were going to hold you for the police to arrive.
Would you really believe that they have the best intentions for you?
Important to note that these three men would still not have been following Georgia law vis-a-vis citizen’s arrest:
A private person may arrest an offender if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge. If the offense is a felony and the offender is escaping or attempting to escape, a private person may arrest him upon reasonable and probable grounds of suspicion.
[bolding mine]
The legal analysts that I’ve heard opine – to the one – have said that there was no legal justification for a citizen’s arrest for the possibility of previous trespassing.
And that’s the problem. It isn’t in any way, shape, or form reasonable for someone to shoot someone merely for being on their property. No law has ever supported this, even in so-called “stand your ground” states.
The only time it is reasonable to shoot someone is in self-defense or defense of others. This requires a reasonable belief that the person in question has put your life in danger, with no other options. In most contexts, it includes a duty to retreat.
You seem to get this, since you keep arguing that these three didn’t intend to kill. You’re clearly arguing that, if they did intend to kill a trespasser, that would be sufficient to call them murderers. And yet you keep on arguing as if that type of murder is reasonable.
I had hoped that the fact you only responded to the claim of racism in my previous post and not the other part meant you realized how utterly horrible your claim is. If you cannot do so, then my only conclusion is that you think you have the right to shoot people on your property simply because you don’t recognize them.
You don’t.
I think it will still have a positive effect.
Maybe the would-be vigilantes will have less incentive to take their own videos and share them with the public, but even the most unaware people around will realize that cameras are everywhere these days, and even if they get their story straight after doing their deed there’s a much better chance of that story being directly contradicted by evidence sometime later. They won’t be sleeping easy, and I expect some degree of deterrent effect.
One good thing to come from this case is the repeal of Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law.
So I’m hopeful we will have fewer cases like this in the future, at least in Georgia.
My sister lives in Georgia, as does her racist, blacks-hating ex-husband. I have no idea why they got married (actually, I do, but it’s a long story well beyond the scope of this). He would always claim he wasn’t racist, but he was.
While no one but these three criminals know for sure, it really seems like the likely motive was racism. That had a white person done the same thing, these three wouldn’t have acted the same.
By their own testimony, it was more than trespassing. They talked about the supposed fear of a crime wave from outsiders and their attorneys’ dog whistles, “outsiders” was a code for blacks.
They had jumped to conclusions that because this black guy was on the construction site, that he must be the same one who stole their gun from their truck, so he must be a crook and must be stopped.
No one other that those three scums know the actual truth, and they probably lack the self-awareness to understand their own motives so this question may never get answered.
I’m sure there was racism involved, twice over: racism provided the justification that they had “good intentions” because they assume running black people out of the neighborhood is a “good neighbor” act, and because part of the pleasure of being violent, angry assholes to Arbury would be the feeling of power over a black dude. It reminds them of their own social status as inherently superior.
I wasn’t trying to say they weren’t motivated by race, but that they weren’t motivated by a misguided, racist desire to “help”. This was sport.
Nobody, not these three nor the police officer who was talking to them and showed the video of the black man looking around the house under construction, seemed to be at all concerned about the white people doing the same thing.
For me that’s the clearest indication of racism in this case.
This comes to the question of how racists were (are?) they? The first option would be not racists, where they simply were trying to protect a neighbor’s property and would have hunted down anyone of any race? This seems so overwhelmingly unlikely. Perhaps the pitee is the only one who is convinced that visiting a construction site is so egregious that racism wouldn’t need to play a part. Who knows?
Certainly, I think that many racists are convinced that this is the case and would tell you that that these boys would have chased and trapped anyone of any color. I believe that racism blinds people to reality.
In any case, I believe most people were reject this hypothesis.
The other extreme is if the actions were simply sport, as you suggest. That these assholes were looking for any reason to bully any black man, and derived pleasure from violent actions against a black dude. ISTM that in that case, the “crime” would be secondary to a violent form of racism. Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but that was my reading.
I’m sure that they are racists and their racism lead them to believe that Arbery was a criminal, because he was a black man in their neighborhood and that they, as white men, had the right to take extrajudicial measures because they were white and Arbery was black.
In this video of the police interview with the father (starts at 11:08) the father seems completely convinced that his son has just shot a criminal.
As I said, I’m sure that this certainty in the minds of the three came from racism, and they believed they were acting completely within their rights as white men to take the actions they did.
I don’t know how to tell if this were sport, as you suggest.
Listening to the judge explain his reasons for the sentencing, around the 7 minute mark of the video at this link, it does sound close to shooting him for sport, as @MandaJo suggests. The judge notes that the prosecutor said that when they could not scare or intimidate him, they killed him.
And going back to the subject of this pitting, the judge talks about how disturbing it was to him that Roddie Bryan said that if the guy would have stopped, nothing would have happened.
Fortunately, the judge is a decent human being, and not slime who blames the victim for the crime.
Hmm. I actually do feel bad about the life ruined in that case, and I’m not a fan of “felony murder”. But this case is a good use of it. Everyone knows it’s wrong to hold up a convenience store. Not everyone seems to know it’s wrong to lynch random black men for misdemeanor trespass (if it was even that). So the sentence may help send that message. If it prevents one innocent person from being murdered, it’s worth it.
I do too. I feel that most crimes of that sort only happen after society has failed them. But I was asking that of someone who I seem to remember is a bit harsher on criminals. Just not these particular criminals.
TBH, I don’t remember for sure, which is why I asked, rather than stated, so if I’m wrong, he’s welcome to correct me.
I don’t disagree. They certainly didn’t seem to know what they were doing was wrong. The person who holds up a store almost certainly knows what they are doing is wrong, but has been pushed through desperation to do so anyway. These people were in no desperate situation, they chose to hunt down and kill this man.
This assumes that the stick-up guy is desperate. Maybe he is but maybe he just finds it easier to rob a store than work 40 hours a week. I find it pretty hard to sympathize with armed robbers who end up shot by store owners. If you’re going to steal out of desperation to eat, then grab the food and leave. When you introduce violence and end up on the short end of the stick, that’s on you.
What if the person pretends to have a gun and gets shot? (Asking out of curiosity, not argument).
I don’t think that is often going to be the case, that someone just decides that they’d rather risk death and imprisonment rather than get a job. Either there are no jobs, or they can’t hold one. If your point is that they have mental health problems, then that is one of the ways that society has failed them.
Maybe they were holding up the place just in order to buy drugs, in which case, the whole war on drugs mentality of society has harmed this individual.
I know that people like to demonize and dehumanize anyone who commits a criminal act, but I think it’s pretty disgusting. There go you, but for the grace of god.
There is more to just food in this world, if you hadn’t noticed. Some people have to pay rent, or they have to pay for a car, sometimes even people can’t afford life saving medicine as simple as insulin.
Like I said, if someone is holding a gun on a shop owner, something has gone very wrong in that person’s life. Chances are very slim that they chose to end up in that position.
So, if someone follows your advice of just grab the food and leave, are you sympathetic to the store owner if he introduces violence?
Very few people are violent criminals just to be violent criminals, and most have had something go very wrong. However, IMHO its the responsibility of society as a whole to work on fixing those problems, not a criminal’s intended victim. A shop owner, faced with a gun in his face, doesn’t need to worry about what brought the criminal to that point, he needs to worry about ending the threat as quickly as possible for himself and others around him. Hopefully that can be done with no violence, but if violence occurs, it remains the fault of the criminal, regardless of the ways society failed him.
I agree, at that point the shopkeeper needs to do what he needs to do to protect himself, though most of the time, that’s going to be handing over the money carefully.
However, it still is the justice system’s responsibility to find out what went wrong, and work to correct it.
The idea that after some arbitrary amount of time, people will be “fixed” is ridiculous. Either we need to be serious about diversion and rehabilitation efforts, or we may as well just start locking people up for life, since it’s not like we really give them much of a chance when they do get out.
That’s not “felony murder”. Felony murder is when you are the getaway driver, you buddy gets shot and killed by the store owner, and you are found guilty of the murder of your buddy, because he died is the course of a felony that you participated in. So you go to prison for life.
The buddy being shot is a form of bad luck. Yes, the shopkeeper had a right to defend himself. And hey, maybe the shopkeeper panicked. That’s understandable. But the getaway driver serving a life sentence for the death is an intentional result of our legal system.