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The guilt or innocence of Arbery's shooters depends on weird technicalities of Georgia's (FWIW, not updated since the Jim Crow ear) citizen's arrest law. It was obvious from the video that this was a bad shoot, under normal circumstances, but it was also reasonably obvious that it would have been a good shoot if the McMichaels had been uniformed cops making a lawful arrest which Arbery resisted.
If you interpret a badly-drafted statute maximally in the McMichaels' favour, you can reach the conclusion that Arbery's trespassing on a building site was a felony and the McMichaels were engaged in legally justified hot pursuit of a dangerous felon, which means that the situation is legally closer to the uniformed cop scenario. Unless you are broadly supportive of white-on-black behaviour-corrective violence in the way that the Jim Crow era legislature that wrote the law was, this is an absurd legal result, and it isn't surprising that the Georgia courts didn't buy it.
But morally, the only argument for what the McMichaels were doing was "in a high-crime society, good ol' boys blowing away an outsider acting suspiciously in someone else's neighborhood is pro-social". That argument was, indeed, made on the pages of the Motte.
But the building owner says he has security cameras and doesn't think that Arbery trespassed. Other people did at previous nights. Including a black guy. But as best the property owner knows not Arbery and especially not on the day of his murder.
His murderers never saw him on anyone's private property. They saw him on the public road and killed him there. And people around here argued it was justified by adding a lot of fictional information to their description of what happened.
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Relatedly, whatever the legal guilt or innocence of Arbery and his killers, I do feel worse for a crazy lady that got gunned down in her own home than a guy that was likely casing a neighborhood. If we're ranking relative badness of shoots, the legal distinction between the shooters being police or clumsily constructed posses isn't going to change my mind much about which victim is more sympathetic.
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You make it sound like they sniped him the moment he passed on to the property.
If you want to make the case that ordinary citizens shouldn't play cops, and go chasing criminals that are clearly retreating, than go ahead and make that case. The arguments for it are pretty strong by themselves, you don't have to act like they went hunting for the guy.
He wasn't on anyone's property. Given the private security cameras at the partway built home, we know he didn't visit there either that day.
He was jogging down the public street. Not trespassing anywhere. Maybe he had bad motivations for jogging down the street. Such as possibly taking a look at houses to remember later for burglarizing.
Given what they did, sure, you could describe it as them hunting him down.
"Hunting him down" would require an intent to kill him when he was posing no threat. The way they acted was extremely dumb, but their behavior does not match yours or MadMonzer's description.
They saw him jogging on the public street. They chased him in trucks for a bit until he got tired of running from them. When he turned on them, they killed him.
That is fairly characterized as hunting him down.
I told you what I think is necessary for that characterization to be fair, and it's entirely missing from the argument. What they did is bad enough, there's no need act like they were intending to kill him.
If they weren't intending to kill him, or at least holding reckless indifference to the possibility of killing him, then riding him down in trucks with guns out sure is a special way to not intend to do it.
If they intended to kill him, waiting to do that until they're grappling with him is an even more special way to do it.
They were reckless, that's my entire point. You're trying to ascribe intentionality to it, which is plainly inaccurate.
They never grappled with him. They shot him from a distance from their trucks. They were quite safe.
I take your larger point about the intent needed for the legal definition of muder. I don't much care to play mind reading games, other than noticing that for people not intending to kill him, they sure aggressively acted in a way that led to them shooting him. Riding someone down with trucks and brandished firearms is very aggressively manslaughtering then and I'd even say "hunting them down". Perhaps even murdering them depending on the jurisdiction.
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