Brunswick, Georgia – The jury selection will conclude on Tuesday in the trial of criminal misconduct of a former prosecutor of Georgia accused of interfering in the police investigation of the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbetería.
White men with weapons and trucks pursued and fatally shot the black man running on neighborhood street after they mistakenly suspected that he was a thief. The man who began the deadly search had worked for the local district prosecutor.
Now that prosecutor, former district prosecutor Jackie JohnsonHe has returned to court as a criminal defendant, accused of violating his oath, a serious crime and a minor crime of hindering the police while investigating the murder of arberry. Johnson has denied irregularities, saying that he immediately delivered the case to an external prosecutor.
The main judge John R. Turner planned to sit on a jury on Tuesday morning at the Glynn County Palace in the Port City of Brunswick. Jury selection He started a week ago, but he was delayed by a rare winter storm left by the coastal community covered with snow and ice.
Declarations to open prosecutors and defense lawyers were scheduled for later on Tuesday after a jury of 12 people plus two alternative jurors sit. The Office of the Attorney General of Georgia, Chris Carr, is processing the case.
The judge said that Johnson’s trial will last two weeks or more. It stops in the same court where arberry assailants were sentenced by murder In 2021.
Father and son Greg and Travis McMichael put together and persecuted arberry, 25, in a truck after seeing him run beyond his house on February 23, 2020. A neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, joined the Search in his own truck video and Celicitary video of Travis McMichael shooting arberry with a signal at significance.
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 need some tips immediately,” he said in a voice mail that remains on Johnson’s cell phone and then included in the judicial records.
More than two months passed without arrests until Bryan’s graphic video on filming leaked online. The Georgia Investigation Office took over the case of the Local Police and arrested McMichaels and Bryan for murder charges.
Prosecutors say Johnson abused his office trying to protect the McMichaels. The accusation says that Johnson showed “favor and affection” towards Greg McMichael and interfered with the police by “directing that Travis McMichael should not be arrested.”
The three men were sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of murder in 2021. They were also convicted of federal hate crimes in a separate trial the following year.
Johnson was voted of the office in November 2020 after 10 years as a district prosecutor for the Judicial Circuit of the five Brunswick counties. She largely blamed her defeat to the controversy for the murder of arberry months before.
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