A jury of 12 plus three alternates were sworn in Tuesday in the criminal misconduct trial of a former Georgia prosecutor charged with interfering in the police investigation of the 2020 killing of Ahmaud Arbery.
White men with guns and pickup trucks chased and fatally shot the running Black man on a neighborhood street after they wrongly suspected he was a thief. The man who started the deadly pursuit had worked for the local district attorney.
Now former District Attorney Jackie Johnson has returned to court as a criminal defendant, charged with violating her oath of office, a felony, and a misdemeanor count of hindering police as they investigated Arbery’s killing. Johnson has denied wrongdoing, saying she immediately handed the case to an outside prosecutor.
Senior Judge John R. Turner seated the jury at the Glynn County courthouse a week after jury selection began in the in the port city of Brunswick. It was delayed by a rare winter storm that left the coastal community coated in snow and ice.
The jury was to hear opening statements from prosecutors and defense attorneys Tuesday afternoon. Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s office is prosecuting the case.
The judge said he expects Johnson’s trial to last two weeks or more. It’s being held at the same courthouse where Arbery’s assailants were convicted of murder in 2021.
Father and son Greg and Travis McMichael armed themselves and chased the 25-year-old Arbery in a pickup truck after seeing him run past their house on Feb. 23, 2020. A neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, joined the pursuit in his own truck and recorded cellphone video of Travis McMichael shooting Arbery with a shotgun at point-blank range.
Greg McMichael was a retired investigator who had worked for Johnson. He called her roughly an hour after the killing.
“My son and I have been involved in a shooting, and I need some advice right away,” he said in a voicemail left on Johnson’s cellphone and later included in court records.
More than two months passed with no arrests until Bryan’s graphic video of the shooting leaked online. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case from local police and arrested the McMichaels and Bryan on murder charges.
Prosecutors say Johnson abused her office by trying to shield the McMichaels. The indictment says Johnson showed “favor and affection” toward Greg McMichael and interfered with police by “directing that Travis McMichael should not be placed under arrest.”
All three men were sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of murder in 2021. They were also found guilty of federal hate crimes in a separate trial the following year.
Johnson was voted out of office in November 2020 after 10 years as district attorney for the five-county Brunswick Judicial Circuit. She largely blamed her defeat on controversy over Arbery’s killing months earlier.