Here's the 2-1 opinion. Judge Branch wrote the majority (with Grant joining). District Judge Calvert dissented on an interesting interstate commerce issue related to the kidnapping counts.
Courthouse news summarizes it here:
The 11th Circuit on Friday upheld the convictions of the three white
men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery five years ago after chasing the
25-year-old Black man down the streets of a Georgia subdivision.
In a split opinion, the circuit judges ruled that sufficient evidence supported their convictions.
Travis
McMichael, his father Greg McMichael, and neighbor William “Roddie”
Bryan were convicted in February 2022 of a federal hate crime and
attempted kidnapping in Ahmaud Arbery’s killing and sentenced to life in
prison. On appeal, they argued prosecutors failed to prove they acted with racist intent.
A
three-judge panel rejected that claim, finding ample evidence of racial
animus in the men’s private conversations and social media posts, which
showed longstanding prejudice toward Black people and support for
vigilante justice.
***
The men also asked the court to toss the attempted kidnapping
charges, claiming the streets of the neighborhood were not a public
road.
“Copious evidence supports the jury’s underlying finding
that Glynn County ‘provided or administered’ the streets of Satilla
Shores,” U.S. Circuit Judge Elizabeth Branch wrote in the opinion.
Branch
and U.S. Circuit Judge Britt Grant, both Trump appointees, rejected the
men’s arguments and found sufficient circumstantial evidence for jurors
to conclude they intended to block Arbery’s access to a public road by
chasing him with guns and boxing him in with their pickup trucks.
The
panel noted the streets were central to the crime, as the entire
pursuit and shooting unfolded along the roads of Satilla Shores. Branch
wrote it was reasonable to infer that, without Arbery’s use of those
streets, the specific crime would not have occurred.
“The jury had ample evidence that defendants attempted to kidnap Arbery for a benefit,” Branch wrote.
“Based
on their posts supporting vigilantism and associating black people with
criminality, the jury could have reasonably inferred that the
defendants acted to boost their reputation as neighborhood
crime-stoppers, to remove suspected criminals from their streets, or to
promote their sense of vigilante justice. Or, based on their racist and
often violent language, the jury could have reasonably inferred that
they acted to gain some personal satisfaction by inflicting violence on a
black man,” she added.
The three-judge circuit panel was rounded
out by U.S. District Judge Victoria Calvert, a Joe Biden appointee
sitting in from the Northern District Court of Georgia, who disagreed
with one aspect of the majority’s ruling.
In a dissenting opinion,
Calvert said she would have reversed the men’s kidnapping convictions.
She disagreed with the majority’s conclusion that the pickup trucks used
by Travis and Greg McMichael qualify as instrumentalities of interstate
commerce for attempted kidnapping.
When a victim is not
transported across state lines, evidence must show the offender either
traveled in interstate or foreign commerce or used the mail or another
instrumentality of interstate or foreign commerce to commit or further
the crime.
“Here, the evidence showed that the defendants used
Travis’s truck to drive on the streets of a residential community to
pursue Arbery and then parked Travis’s truck to block Arbery from
fleeing,” Calvert wrote.
“There was no interstate travel, no use
of the interstate highway system, no exchange of communications via
phone or text message, and no use of the internet,” she added.
While
the decision aligns with those of other circuit courts, Calvert said it
raises constitutional concerns about the balance between state and
federal prosecution.
