Defendants' convictions in the Ahmaud Arbery murder case upheld

 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.

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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.