After it took two changes of prosecutor and a leaked video before Gregory and Travis McMichael were arrested and charged with murder and aggravated assault, Georgia’s attorney general has asked the Department of Justice to investigate how the case was handled. “We are committed to a complete and transparent review of how the Ahmaud Arbery case was handled from the outset,” Attorney General Chris Carr said in a statement Sunday.
“We have requested the involvement of the DOJ since we first took this case,” S. Lee Merritt, the attorney for Arbery’s parents, wrote in a statement. “There are far too many questions about how this case was handled and why it took 74 days for two of the killers to be arrested and charged in Mr. Arbery’s death.”
According to the press release from Carr’s office, “The request to the U.S. Department of Justice includes, but is not limited to, investigation of the communications and discussions by and between the Office of the District Attorney of the Brunswick Judicial Circuit and the Office of the District Attorney of the Waycross Judicial Circuit related to this case.”
Arbery was out jogging when the two McMichaels decided to stalk him, try to stop him, and ultimately shot him repeatedly when he refused to follow the orders of armed strangers. Father Gregory is a retired police officer. The first prosecutor assigned to the case, Jackie Johnson of the Brunswick Judicial Circuit, ultimately recused herself because McMichael had been an investigator in her office. The second prosecutor, George E. Barnhill of the Waycross Judicial Circuit, recused himself after Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper, complained about Barnhill’s son having previously worked with McMichael.
“It was a lynching,” Merritt has said, and that’s sure how the video—apparently taken by a friend of the McMichaels intending to commemorate the occasion—makes it look. And, as with so many lynchings in history, the Georgia legal establishment appeared to fall in line for what Merritt called a “potential cover-up.” The leaking of the video changed that, but it remains to be seen if justice will be done—and having to rely on the Trump-Barr Justice Department isn’t confidence-inspiring.