A federal judge has rejected a plea deal reached by the prosecution and Travis McMichael on hate crime charges regarding the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. The judge’s decision came down in court on Monday.
In exchange for admitting that the crime was racially motivated, prosecutors would’ve recommended McMichael serve 30 years of his sentence in federal prison. After completing the federal time, McMichael would have been moved back to Georgia to finish his sentence of life in prison without parole.
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Wanda Cooper-Jones, the mother of Arbery, slammed the plea deal as “disrespectful.”
“Please listen to me,” Cooper-Jones told the judge. “Granting these men their preferred conditions of confinement would defeat me. It gives them one last chance to spit in my face after murdering my son.”
S. Lee Merritt, an attorney representing Cooper-Jones, previously labeled federal prison “a country club compared to state prison.”
Prior to the judgment, federal prosecutor Tara Lyons praised the deal, saying it “powerfully advances the larger interest of justice.”
“Through this resolution, the defendants will accept responsibility for the full nature of their crime, admitting publicly in front of the nation that this offense was racially motivated,” Lyons had said.
The next hearing in the case will be Friday.
[Via]