More Acquittals?

I don’t think I’ve written anything about the Ahmaud Arbery case. If I have, I doubt I wrote much. It didn’t interest me, because it seemed like things were going smoothly. At first glance, it looked like several overzealous civilians tried to apprehend a black suspect without authority and shot him when he grabbed one of their guns. I figured they were probably guilty of some kind of homicide, so I didn’t pay much attention to the reactions of leftists. I thought they were going to get what they wanted, so it didn’t matter to me whether they said things that weren’t true.

I’ve been looking at it a little bit today, and I’m somewhat disturbed. We might be looking at 5 acquittals in one month. If that happens, good luck buying Christmas presents at malls this year. They will all be looted and burned.

Ahmaud Arbery was an emotional young man who did not react wisely when challenged. There is a video of him scaring two cops to the point where one tried to tase him. He felt he had been detained unfairly, and he was belligerent and physically threatening. Later, on the day he died, he was detained by several civilians who thought he had been stealing in their area. He had been seen trespassing at a construction site.

The civilians were armed. They parked a truck across a road where Arbery was jogging. When he reached them, one was holding a shotgun. Arbery charged him and began trying to rip the gun out of his hands. The gun was fired three times, and the encounter is on video, but the video doesn’t show the shooting. You can hear the shots, but you can’t see what happened.

My understanding is that Arbery didn’t actually steal things. I don’t know if that’s true. In any event, he didn’t have any stolen items on him when he died.

Here is the problem: Arbery attacked the man who shot him, and, depending on the law and what the jury believes, it’s possible the jury will acquit. If they do acquit, it may be the right thing to do under the circumstances, but there is no way most Americans will believe it.

I know a little bit about the law of self-defense, so I’ll explain it.

If I’m in my house, and I’m holding a gun, and you charge me and try to rip it out of my hands, I can shoot you legally. I would be in reasonable fear of serious harm, and that would trigger the right to use lethal force.

What if I’m in your house because I’ve broken in illegally, and the same thing happens? I go to prison. Why? Because you lose the right to self-defense when you’re committing a crime. If that were not true, burglars would have the right to shoot back at the police. They do not.

Okay, so the question is this: did the man who shot Arbery have the right to defend himself, or was he committing a crime when he fired?

Based on short glances at news stories, the defense is claiming the white men with the guns had a legal right to stop and detain Arbery, using firearms. Either their attorneys are utter morons, or there must be some legal basis for their strategy. If there is, there may well be three acquittals.

I am too lazy to Google Georgia law, but it may be that civilians there are allowed to pursue and arrest suspected criminals while bearing arms. If that is true, it is probably necessary to establish that the suspicion is reasonable, and it may be that the law only applies to felonies, so the defense would have to convince the jury Arbery was reasonably suspected of committing a serious crime. I’m guessing at the law, but this is how the law generally works. If the law entitles you to do something, you have to show you did it right.

Another big problem here is the standard of proof. If the men are acquitted, the public will never understand the standard. Laymen often think a defendant has to prove he’s innocent, but of course, that isn’t true. The prosecution has to prove he’s guilty. That requires evidence. Because the shooting was not on camera, there is no evidence of what the shooter and Arbery did, except for the shooter’s testimony, if he chooses to take the stand. Arbery can’t contradict him, because he’s dead. The defense will present a story, and the prosecution will present a story. If the jury doesn’t know which story is true, it has to acquit even if everyone on the jury thinks the shooter and his friends are guilty.

You don’t convict because you’re pretty sure a defendant is guilty. You have to be very sure. When there isn’t much evidence, it’s hard to be sure.

Maybe the forensics will somehow help the prosecution.

The kneejerk press and the riot-prone masses will never understand if the jury decides it’s not sure what happened. They never understand how it works. They’ll say a racist jury acquitted three racists, just because Arbery was black. Free TV’s and Vuitton bags for everyone.

Anyway, I’m not taking a position on guilt or innocence. This isn’t like the Rittenhouse trial, where the defendant’s innocence was unquestionable. I don’t know whether the law was violated or not.

I will say this: Arbery made a big mistake. You don’t try to wrestle a shotgun away from an armed man. You will put him in fear for his life, and you can expect him to shoot you, legally or illegally. The shooter in this case had a choice between letting a very angry man take his gun or shooting to save his own life and two others and taking his chances with a jury. You don’t want to give another person that choice.

Even if Arbery was afraid they would drive him to the country and shoot him, which might not have been an unreasonable fear, he should have cooperated and waited for a better opportunity to escape. Even if they intended to kill him, and they said so, and they put a post on Facebook saying, “We are going to kill this guy,” it would have been smarter to wait and look for a better opening.

I’m not saying he asked to be shot or that it was okay to detain him. Just that he escalated a dangerous situation unwisely when it wasn’t necessary. If he had stayed calm, he might have been shot anyway, but because he lost his temper, he assured it.

Because the standard of proof is very high for the prosecution and very low for the defense, and because the evidence is subject to spin because of the problems with the video, it may be that we are in for another highly controversial verdict.

Whether the public understands it or not, when a defendant is guilty but the prosecution can’t prove it, the law says he should be acquitted. That’s just how it is.

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Okay, I broke down and read about Georgia’s citizen-arrest law, which has been repealed since the killing. You have to show the person you detained was reasonably suspected of committing a felony. The prosecutor claims Arbery was only guilty of trespassing, which is a misdemeanor. Since evidence that Arbery committed felonies appears to be absent, it doesn’t sound too good for the defendants.