The multiple guilty verdicts last Wednesday against three white Georgia men who cornered and murdered a Black jogger marked a refreshing turn of justice. A jury drew a much-needed line between stand-your-ground laws and gun-carrying vigilantes who have been emboldened to go on human hunting sprees. The nearly all-white jury decided that spurious assertions of self-defense and false allegations of hostile intent by the victim, Ahmaud Arbery, were no excuse for the reckless actions of defendants Travis McMichael and his father, Gregory McMichael, and their neighbor, William Bryan.
That’s how the system is supposed to work every time. Unfortunately, the results too often lead to disappointment for Americans who want to see punishment for vigilantes who go out with guns looking for trouble and wind up killing people without justification. Long before the Nov. 20 not-guilty verdict for teenage vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse in Wisconsin, there was George Zimmerman in 2012. He stalked Black teenager Trayvon Martin on a Florida street, confronted the unarmed boy without justification, then killed him. Zimmerman and Rittenhouse inserted themselves into dangerous confrontations without cause, then convinced jurors that self-defense was their only way to get out alive.
Race issues played a role in all three cases. But in Georgia, prosecutor Jackie Johnson smartly sidestepped potential racial motivations to focus on the way gun owners misinterpret stand-your-ground laws as a license to kill.
