Travis McMichael, one of three white men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, in 2020 withdrew his guilty plea on a federal hate crime charge Friday.
His father, Gregory McMichael, withdrew his guilty plea a day earlier. Last year, a Georgia jury found the McMichaels and another man, William "Roddie" Bryan, guilty of murdering Arbery.
The McMichaels had reached a plea agreement with the Department of Justice that would have allowed them to serve 30 years of their sentence in a federal prison rather than a state prison. It would have been the first time the men admitted publicly that Arbery's slaying was racially motivated.
But Arbery's family vehemently opposed the deal, arguing that federal prisons often have more resources and are more comfortable than state prisons. They strongly urged U.S. District Judge Lisa Wood to reject the deal, and she ultimately did on the grounds that they would have locked her into a fixed sentence.
When news of the plea agreements broke, family attorney Lee Merritt called it “a huge accommodation to the men who hunted down and murdered Ahmaud Arbery.”
He elaborated on Twitter:
Arbery's mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said the DOJ went “behind my back to offer the men who murdered my son a deal to make their time in prison easier to serve.”
The DOJ has since refuted their claims that it circumvented the family in making the deal. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said earlier this week that the DOJ “entered the plea agreement only after the victims’ attorneys informed me that the family was not opposed to it.” But Merritt claimed that wasn’t entirely true.
Speaking outside a federal courthouse earlier this week, Merritt said Arbery’s family had previously rejected the DOJ’s terms and “no longer wanted to engage” with prosecutors, who “took that as a deferral.”
In either event, the McMichaels and Bryan will not be serving time on their own terms, as expected. Jury selection for their federal trial begins Monday.
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