Three white men serving prison sentences in the 2020 killing of Ahmaud Arbery are asking an appeals court to throw out their federal hate crime convictions, with two of them arguing their histories of making racist comments don’t prove they targeted Arbery because he was Black.
“Every crime committed against an African American by a man who has used racist language in the past is not a hate crime,” defense attorney Pete Theodocion said in an appellate brief written on behalf of defendant William “Roddie” Bryan.
Arbery, 25, was chased by pickup trucks and fatally shot in the streets of a Georgia subdivision outside the port city of Brunswick on Feb. 23, 2020. His killing sparked a national outcry when cellphone video Bryan recorded of the shooting leaked online more than two months later.
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