Everyone Knew Who Shot Ahmaud Arbery. Why Did the Killers Walk Free?
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 24 August 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Summary
It has been six months since Ahmaud Arbery, a young Black man, was shot by three white men while he was out for a Sunday jog near his childhood home. The video of the killing, taken by one of the men who participated in it, could be said to have kindled the blaze that ignited after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
There was no mystery to be solved in Arbery’s killing. It happened in broad daylight, and the men who did it were on the scene when police arrived. But the killers walked free, and no one was arrested for seventy-four days—until after the video was made public and caused a scandal. What, exactly, were prosecutors thinking? Caroline Lester spoke with Arbery’s mother, a local reporter, lawyers, and a district attorney to understand what happened in those seventy-four days. His case, she finds, highlights a fundamental problem for criminal-justice reform: we may change the laws that govern policing, but those laws have to be vigorously enforced. And district attorneys may have little incentive to do so.
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| 0:48.8 | I'm Dorothy Wickendon. |
| 0:50.9 | On today's Politics and More podcast, the New Yorker radio hours Caroline Lester looks at the |
| 0:56.5 | shooting of Ahmad Arbery and the forces that have hindered the effort to prosecute the men who |
| 1:01.9 | killed him. I'm Vincent Cunningham. When we look back at everything that's gone on in 2020, |
| 1:10.4 | our heads will fill |
| 1:11.2 | with images, empty city streets, a field hospital set up in Central Park, and the image of |
| 1:17.2 | George Floyd's death at the knee of a policeman, which I think will remember as a turning |
| 1:21.5 | point in America's reckoning with race. But just weeks before George Floyd, there was another |
| 1:27.0 | unwatchable, haunting video, which might have kindled the fire that soon blazed up across the country. |
| 1:33.8 | That video showed a young black man named Amad Arbery, gunned down by white men. |
| 1:40.0 | One of those men took the video, and no one was arrested for the crime for two and a half months. |
| 1:46.5 | Why? How? |
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