The Men Who Killed Ahmaud Arbery Were Convicted of Murder. Now They Are on Trial for Racism.

The three men who chased Ahmaud Arbery through a Brunswick, Georgia, suburb in 2020, resulting in a deadly confrontation, were convicted of murder by a state jury in November. All three were sentenced to life in prison. Now the same three white men are on trial in federal court for the same conduct, facing the possibility of additional life sentences if prosecutors can persuade the jury that they targeted Arbery, who was black, “because of his race.”

According to the Supreme Court, this second prosecution does not amount to double jeopardy, because the state and federal crimes, defined by two different “sovereigns,” are not “the same offense.” But since Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan are already serving life sentences, you might wonder why the federal government is bothering to prosecute them again.

The answer seems to be that the Justice Department wants to condemn them as racists as well as murderers. “This is the kind of case you really need to do to send the message that the Justice Department won’t tolerate this type of racist hatred that results in violence,” former federal prosecutor Shan Wu told The Washington Post. Federal prosecutors are using the trial to make a moral statement about the defendants’ beliefs, which is not ordinarily seen as a legitimate function of criminal courts.

Yesterday, The New York Times reports, the jury was presented with “voluminous digital evidence of racism” aimed at establishing the defendants’ guilt. That evidence included a meme that Gregory McMichael—who first deemed Arbery suspicious and accompanied his son, Travis McMichael, in the pickup truck they used to chase him—shared on social media in 2016. “White Irish slaves were treated worse than any other race in the U.S.,” the post said, followed by “vulgar language that contrasted the Irish with other racial or ethnic groups who demanded ‘free’ things.”

The prosecution also noted Travis McMichael’s reaction to “a video of a Black person playing a practical joke.” The younger McMichael, who fired the shotgun that killed Arbery, “responded by using a racist epithet and saying he would kill the person who made the joke.”

The Post reports that the evidence also included “a litany of conversations” in which Travis McMichael “denigrated Black people, often while calling them the n-word.” The messages showed that McMichael “associated Black people with criminality” and “blamed them when he struggled to get a commercial driver’s license, accusing them of ‘running the show.'” In one message, McMichael said “he loved his job because ‘zero n—-rs work with me.'”

What about Bryan, who drove his own pickup tru