Washington Post Opinion: The Arbery case is heinous, but his killers' sentences are extreme [View all]

[former9thward]

As a human being, I felt nauseated watching the video of Ahmaud Arbery being shot to death by three White men who had hunted him down as he jogged through a Brunswick, Ga., neighborhood. As a Black man, I feared that Arbery’s killers would escape justice before an almost all-White jury in a state court. And as a political progressive committed to dismantling white supremacy, I was relieved when the jury found Arbery’s killers guilty of murder.

Yet the punishments the three men received — in the state case, life in prison for William “Roddie” Bryan, who joined the pursuit of Arbery and recorded the incident with his cellphone, and life in prison without parole for Gregory McMichael and his son Travis, who fired the fatal shots; and just this week in the federal case, two more life sentences plus additional years for the McMichaels and 35 years for Bryan — left me questioning whether such lengthy sentences are what justice requires. As a former public defender who now works to end mass incarceration and the extreme sentences that contribute to it, I believe the answer is clear: no.

The United States has distinguished itself as the world’s largest incarcerator. With more than 2 million people behind bars, we lead the world in the percentage of the population that is in prison. Meanwhile, the racial composition of our jails and prisons reflects our failure to achieve racial justice in this country. In Ohio, where I live and practice law, Black people make up 13 percent of the total population but approximately 45 percent of the state’s prison population. Similar patterns exist across the country.

Contrary to what many believe, mass incarceration is not the result of locking lots of people up for low-level, nonviolent crimes. According to such sentencing experts as Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis, life and other extreme sentences are the real drivers of the 500 percent increase in the prison population over the past 40 years. In their book “The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences,” Mauer and Nellis note that one out of seven people in prison in the United States has been sentenced to life. They say that lengthy sentences make no sense from a public safety perspective, given that most people age out of committing violent crimes by their mid-20s. Additionally, continuing to imprison people long past the time when they can be safely released is expensive, especially when they are elderly.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/11/arbery-killers-sentences-extreme/

I agree. Those who celebrate these sentences are also condemning mainly POC to draconian sentences.