Ahmaud Arbery’s family still waiting for former prosecutor’s malpractice trial after 3 years

SAVANNAH, Georgia — Three years after a former Georgia district attorney was indicted on charges accusing her of interfering with the police investigation into the 2020 killing of Ahmaud Arbery, the case’s slow progress through the court system has ground to a halt, a halt the presiding judge insists is temporary.

Jackie Johnson was the chief prosecutor in coastal Glynn County in February 2020, when Arbery was chased by three white men in pickup trucks who had spotted him running through their neighborhood. The 25-year-old Black man died in the street after one of his pursuers shot him with a shotgun.

Johnson transferred the case to an outside prosecutor because the man who launched the deadly chase, Greg McMichael, was her former employee. But Georgia’s attorney general says she illegally used her office to try to protect the retired investigator and his son, Travis McMichael, who fired the fatal shots.

Both McMichaels have already been convicted and sentenced to prison in back-to-back federal murder and hate crime trials. So has a neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, whose cellphone video of the shooting sparked a national outcry over Arbery’s death. A court heard their first appeals six months ago.

The criminal misconduct case against Johnson has moved at a relatively slow pace since a grand jury indicted her on September 2, 2021, on one count of violating her oath of office and one count of misdemeanor obstructing a police officer.

As the men responsible for Arbery’s death serve life sentences, the slain man’s family has insisted that justice will not be complete until Johnson is tried.

“This is very, very important,” said Wanda Cooper-Jones, Arbery’s mother. “Jackie Johnson was really part of the problem from the beginning.”

Johnson has pleaded not guilty and denied any wrongdoing. After losing her re-election bid in 2020, she told The Associated Press that she immediately recused herself from the handling of Arbery’s killing because of Greg McMichael’s involvement.

Johnson’s case has stalled because one of his attorneys, Brian Steel, has spent most of the past two years in an Atlanta courtroom defending Grammy-winning rapper Young Thug against racketeering and gang charges. Jury selection in the case took 10 months, with prosecutors beginning to present evidence last November and continuing to call witnesses.

Senior Judge John R. Turner, who was assigned to Johnson’s case, insists there is nothing he can do but wait.

“If anyone is worried that this is going to be a cover-up, I can assure you that’s not the case,” Turner told the AP in a telephone interview. “It’s moving at a snail’s pace, but it will eventually move forward.”

After Arbery was killed, Greg McMichael told police that he and his son armed themselves and chased the black man, suspecting he was a fugitive. Bryan, who didn’t know either man, made a similar assumption after seeing them drive past his house and joining them in his own truck.

The indictment against Johnson accuses her of telling police they should not arrest Travis McMichael. It also accuses her of “showing favor and affection” to Greg McMichael by hiring George Barnhill, a district attorney from a neighboring judicial circuit, to advise police on how to handle the shooting.

Four days later, the attorney general appointed Barnhill as an outside prosecutor. Carr said he chose Barnhill without knowing that he had already informed police that he saw no grounds for an arrest in Arbery’s death.

Barnhill stepped down after a few weeks, but not before sending a letter to the police captain asserting that the McMichaels had acted lawfully and that Arbery had been killed in self-defense.

After Johnson was charged, she went to jail to be arraigned and was released without bail. Her attorneys waived a formal reading of the charges before a judge, and she has yet to appear in court. The judge denied legal motions by Johnson’s attorneys to dismiss the case last November. Court records show no further developments in the past 10 months.

Johnson’s attorneys, Steel and John Ossick, did not respond to emails and a phone message seeking comment. They argued in court documents that there was “not a shred of evidence” that she interfered with police work.

Prosecutors responded by filing a court filing listing 16 calls between phones belonging to Johnson and Greg McMichael in the weeks after the shooting.

Two legal experts not involved in the case said there is no timeline for Johnson to be tried. She has not been jailed, so there is little pressure to speed up her trial.

Steel’s extended absence due to the Atlanta gang trial is likely not the only factor slowing down the case, Atlanta defense attorney Don Samuel said.

Courts are still struggling with a backlog of cases from the COVID-19 lockdown, he said. And the attorney general’s office has a limited staff of criminal prosecutors with their own busy caseloads.

Samuel also questioned whether prosecutors had a strong case against Johnson. While she has objected to the McMichaels being charged in Arbery’s death, he said, prosecutors have not accused her of accepting bribes or other blatant acts of corruption.

District attorneys “have considerable discretion in deciding what cases to prosecute,” Samuel said. “The idea that we’re going to start prosecuting district attorneys for prosecuting or not prosecuting strikes me as really borderline propriety.”

Danny Porter, a former district attorney in Gwinnett County in metro Atlanta, said prosecutors like Johnson have a legitimate role to play in advising police on whether to arrest suspects before an investigation is complete.

As for Johnson’s 2020 recommendation that the attorney general replace her with another prosecutor who found Arbery’s killing was justified, Porter said, “I don’t think that’s a violation of the law, although it might have angered them.”