Jury Selection will be concluded on Tuesday in the criminal trial of a former public prosecutor in Georgia, accused of interfering with the police investigation of the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery.
White men with guns and pick -ups chased and shot the ongoing black man in a neighborhood street in a neighborhood after they wrongly suspected that he was a thief.
The man who started the deadly chase had worked for the local public prosecutor.
Now that the public prosecutor, former public prosecutor Jackie Johnson, has returned to the court as a criminal suspect, accused of violating her oath of office, a crime and a crime of obstructing the police while they have the murder of Arbery investigated.
Johnson has denied misconduct and said that she immediately handed the case to a public prosecutor.
Senior judge John R. Turner was planning to have a jury on Tuesday morning in the courthouse of Gynn County in the port city of Brunswick.
Jury selection started a week ago, but was delayed by a rare winter storm that left the coastal community in snow and ice.
Opening statements from public prosecutors and defense lawyers were planned for later Tuesday after a jury of 12 people plus two alternative jury members. The office of the Attorney General Chris Carr continues the case.
The judge said he expects the Johnson trial to take two weeks or more. It is held in the same courthouse where Arbery’s attackers were convicted of murder in 2021.
Father and son Greg and Travis McMichael armed themselves and chased 25-year-old Arbery in a pick-up after seeing him run past their house on February 23, 2020.
A neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, joined the chase in his own truck and recorded a mobile phone video of Travis McMichael Die Arbery shot with a shotgun on a point-blank range.
Greg McMichael was a retired researcher who had worked for Johnson. He called her about an hour after the murder.
“My son and I have been involved in a shooting, and I immediately need some advice,” he said in a voicemail that was left on Johnson’s mobile phone and was later included in the court reports.
More than two months passed without arrests until Bryan’s graphic video of the recordings leaked online.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case from the local police and arrested the McMichaels and Bryan for murder.
Prosecutors say that Johnson has abused her office by trying to protect the McMichaels.
The indictment says that Johnson showed ‘favor and affection’ to Greg McMichael and was involved in the police by ‘directing that Travis McMichael should not be arrested’.
All three men were sentenced to life in prison after they were convicted of murder in 2021.
They were also found guilty of federal hate crimes in a separate process the following year.
Johnson was voted out of the office in November 2020 as an public prosecutor for the judicial circuit with five provinces of Brunswick.
She largely blamed her defeat for controversy about the murder of Arbery months earlier.
