2 Racists who Murdered Ahmaud Arbery Get Additional Life Sentences in Prison and Other Racist Gets 35 Yrs for Fed Hate Crimes

From [HERE] The father and son convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery were both given an additional sentence of life in prison Monday on federal hate crime charges, while their neighbor was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

A judge also required that Travis McMichael, 36, Greg McMichael, 66, and William “Roddie” Bryan, 52, serve their sentences in state prison, not federal prison as had been requested by their attorneys.

"A young man is dead. Ahmaud Arbery will be forever 25. And what happened, a jury found, happened because he’s Black," U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood said during Greg McMichael's sentencing. 

The McMichaels and Bryan, who are all white, were found guilty in February on federal hate crime charges in the killing of Arbery, a Black man who was running in their neighborhood when the defendants confronted him in February 2020. The three men were convicted of all of the federal charges against them, including hate crimes, attempted kidnapping and the use of a firearm to commit a crime.

Prosecutors sought life sentences for all three men.

However, Godbey Wood said she thought it was necessary to distinguish Bryan from the McMichaels, in part because unlike his neighbors, he did not bring a gun with him when the men chased Arbery.

"It is not lost on the court that two men brought guns to that situation that had their worst effect and you weren’t one of them," she said. She added, however, that Bryan was “still deserving of an awfully long sentence." 

"By the time you serve your federal sentence, you will be close to 90 years old. But again, Mr. Arbery never got the chance to be 26," she said. "I determined that the sentence imposed is a very lengthy summary and it is one that has been earned."

Prosecutor Tara Lyons called the sentencing hearings “the end of at least one chapter in an excruciatingly painful journey for Ahmaud Arbery’s family, for his community and for an entire nation that has wept for Ahmaud.” 

The men were sentenced separately, in back-to-back trials on Monday.

Amy Lee Copeland, Travis McMichael’s attorney, asked during his sentencing that the judge allow her client to serve his sentence in federal prison because, she said, he had received “hundreds of threats” and would probably be killed in state custody. A.J. Balbo, an attorney for Greg McMichael, told the judge he was medically "not fit" to serve his sentence in state prison.