[News] The Troubling History of Georgia Agency Investigating Ahmaud Arbery Cover-Up

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://theintercept.com/2020/05/14/georgia-bureau-of-investigation-ahmaud-arbery/
The
Troubling History of Georgia Agency Investigating Ahmaud Arbery Cover-Up
Akela Lacy - May 14, 2020
------------------------------

*When the* Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced last week that it
would be probing the Glynn County Police Department’s dismissal of the
killing of Ahmaud Arbery, some people breathed a sigh of relief. It was a
welcome development after the lynching of a 25-year-old black man, whose
white killers had been walking free for 74 days — even though the entire
incident was caught on tape.

But those familiar with the GBI responded with warranted skepticism. Sure,
it was a step in the right direction. But at that point, almost anything
would have been. Local police and elected officials for over two months had
found reasons not to arrest either of the men — Gregory and Travis
McMichael — who chased and killed Arbery while he was jogging. After all,
one was their former colleague. The other, his son.

Hinesville District Attorney Tom Durden, the third prosecutor to take on
the case, formally requested
<https://twitter.com/GBI_GA/status/1257852563971624961?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwgxa.tv%2Fnews%2Flocal%2Fda-opening-investigation-into-death-of-brunswick-man-shot-while-running>
the GBI’s assistance on May 5. It was a critical moment: The disturbing
graphic video of Arbery’s death had been broadcast on national television
and shared thousands of times, following revelations that the Glynn County
Police Department, where Gregory McMichael once worked, and local district
attorneys had gone to great lengths to smear
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6884019-Waycross-DA-Letter-on-Arbery-Shooting-Jp.html>
Arbery’s
name and protect his killers. The public outcry that followed is the reason
the McMichaels were arrested at all.

The GBI — which is generally revered throughout the state and is often
brought in to investigate police-involved shootings of current or former
officers, like Gregory McMichael, to get around conflicts of interest — has
repeatedly been accused of mishandling
<https://investigations.ajc.com/caroline-small-shooting/> such
investigations — in some cases intentionally. The agency has botched
cases in which the investigating officers appeared to be motivated by
racism, leading to wrongful convictions. The agency has also repeatedly
failed to hold accountable and break up powerful networks of officers who
broke laws in the course of their work — causing and covering up
overwhelming violence.

In Georgia, where the Klu Klux Klan
<https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/us/man-wore-kkk-hood-grocery-trnd/index.html>
once infiltrated every level of law enforcement, racism can play a role in
violent crimes and the way they are investigated. Arbery’s case is no
different: There are clear parallels to the lynch mobs that routinely
chased, tortured, and murdered black Americans from the time of slavery
through the 1960s. Between 1877 and 1950, more than 4,000 black people in
the U.S. — including 589 people in Georgia — were killed
<https://www.ajc.com/news/opinion/opinion-russell-name-should-not-halls-justice/rXec8GMYfFbj6z44k523lJ/>
in lynchings. The KKK’s stranglehold over Georgia’s law enforcement
apparatus decades ago laid the groundwork for a historically deadly
relationship between the cops, white people, and black people. The white
supremacist underpinnings of U.S. law enforcement continue to echo
throughout the country, as shown by the multiple other
<https://www.cbsnews.com/news/indianapolis-shooting-police-chief-comments/>
police-involved shootings
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/11/family-seeks-answers-fatal-police-shooting-louisville-woman-her-apartment/>
and others murders
<https://www.bet.com/news/national/2020/05/10/black-transgender-woman-nina-pop.html>
that have taken place since Arbery was killed — and are being covered up
and drowned out during the ongoing pandemic.

Some lawyers in the state are optimistic that the GBI’s new director,
former Cobb County DA and Chief Magistrate Judge Vic Reynolds, will give
the case the attention it deserves. Still, a closer look at the agency’s
record raises questions about whether it can be trusted to do so.

“There are communities that absolutely are skeptical about whether the GBI
or whether any law enforcement agency is going to adequately investigate
its law enforcement brethren,” Jon Rapping, a professor and director of the
criminal justice certificate program at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School,
told The Intercept. “That suspicion undoubtedly is going to create a lot of
skepticism about whether the GBI is going to do justice in this case.”
The KKK and Georgia Cops

The history of the GBI, established in 1937, is interwoven with the history
of the Ku Klux Klan, which was a terrorizing force
<https://www.ajc.com/news/opinion/opinion-russell-name-should-not-halls-justice/rXec8GMYfFbj6z44k523lJ/>
in Georgia in the mid-20th century. One of the earliest directors of the
GBI, who later served as an Atlanta police officer, Sam Roper, was a local
Klan leader when he took over the GBI
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/White_Robes_and_Burning_Crosses/W_4-BAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22atlanta+policeman+sam+roper,+to+lead+the%22&pg=PA95&printsec=frontcover>
after former Georgia Gov. Gene Talmadge won another reelection in 1946.
Roper, whose links
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_FBI_and_the_KKK/YcOSCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22sam+roper+back+on+the+atlanta+%22+kkk+gbi&pg=PA41&printsec=frontcover>
to the agency have been all but wiped from public records, later recruited
Klan members into his police department, Frederick Allen wrote
<https://books.google.com/books?id=-UgsxY0tm_8C&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=sam+roper+georgia+bureau+of+investigation&source=bl&ots=Z9l2_f-Dri&sig=ACfU3U1w8Zh_zPgXA2UEJBeGIF9ySl1LTQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjVga3b767pAhWUknIEHaAhCOAQ6AEwAnoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=sam%20roper%20georgia%20bureau%20of%20investigation&f=false>
in the 1996 book, “Atlanta Rising.” Roper campaigned in support of
Talmadge’s 1946 reelection and planned to install Klan members in “every
Georgia County and pay him $125 a month to ‘assist’ the local sheriff”
after Talmadge won, Allen wrote. Roper left the GBI shortly afterward and
became <https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1949/08/28/issue.html>
an Imperial Wizard
<https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/ajc/id/4018/>
of the KKK in 1949
<https://books.google.com/books?id=W_4-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA95&lpg=PA95&dq=sam+roper+gbi&source=bl&ots=8z_E38_mSZ&sig=ACfU3U2r6YU_SKWWoCDhmPP-2FF-Vpud3A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiux5WP0bPpAhVDhOAKHRx-AJEQ6AEwAXoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=sam%20roper%20succeeded&f=false>
.

[image: May 1946: The new Ku Klux Klan initiates, including several Atlanta
police officers, standing near a burning cross during the initiation
ceremony on Stone Mountain. (Photo by Ed Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection
via Getty Images)]
<https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/05/edit_GettyImages-50873012.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90>

The new Ku Klux Klan initiates, including several Atlanta police officers,
standing near a burning cross during the initiation ceremony on Stone
Mountain in May 1946.

Photo: Ed Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Stetson Kennedy <https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/us/29kennedy.html>, a
human rights activist famous for infiltrating the Klan in the 1940s, wrote
<https://books.google.com/books?id=foytiryjiD8C&pg=PA82&lpg=PA82&dq=gene+talmadge+sam+roper&source=bl&ots=cyxvLa5ATa&sig=ACfU3U3DMjzZAYkAyWTKNkvQyROvOr81fA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi0hZWu8K7pAhVnlXIEHeU7DZgQ6AEwA3oECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=gene%20talmadge%20sam%20roper&f=false>
in his 1990 book that when Klan leader David Duke asked him who was
“running the Klan now,” he told Duke that it was the GBI’s former director,
Roper. “I know Roper all right!” Duke said.

Over the years, including in one unsolved 1946 lynching
<https://www.ajc.com/news/moore-ford-exclusive-read-the-gbi-564-page-file-the-lynching/3BxbL19B4rGydKzpXTk9dM/>
case currently under plans for appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the GBI
and other Georgia law enforcement agencies have been accused of improperly
handling investigations, including those related to Klan-linked killings
<https://apnews.com/4d0b44773e76f396215bab8ee3f516d1>. In more recent
history <https://investigations.ajc.com/caroline-small-shooting/>, the
agency has failed to hold police accountable for deadly violence — or for
detaining, arresting, and extrajudicially killing people, many of whom were
bystanders. (Just last year, the GBI investigated 84 cases of
officer-involved shootings, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported
<https://www.ajc.com/news/crime--law/map-georgia-officer-involved-shootings-under-gbi-investigation-2019/J9XwWmKrmeSDpt4O7tEsEK/>.
The agency does not track officers who were disciplined or charged in those
cases.)

In two
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/07/27/lessons-from-the-drug-raid-that-burned-a-georgia-toddler/>
recent cases that cost local governments over $3 million in settlements
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/02/23/jury-awards-more-than-2-million-to-family-of-pastor-killed-by-narcotics-task-force/>,
the GBI failed to adequately investigate a narcotics task force that
conducted a violent 2014 raid
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/07/27/lessons-from-the-drug-raid-that-burned-a-georgia-toddler/>
that put an infant in a burn unit under a medically induced coma, and killed
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/05/30/drug-task-force-that-burned-a-toddler-this-week-also-killed-an-innocent-pastor-in-2009/>
a reverend in 2009. In both cases, the GBI cleared
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/07/27/lessons-from-the-drug-raid-that-burned-a-georgia-toddler/>
agents of wrongdoing, even blaming the reverend for his own killing. In the
case of  the 2014 raid, which the GBI at the time denied
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/07/27/lessons-from-the-drug-raid-that-burned-a-georgia-toddler/>
that the
local task force had approved — the agency, a former district attorney, and
a grand jury failed to find “what the feds found — that this entire raid
was based on a series of lies,” wrote
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/07/27/lessons-from-the-drug-raid-that-burned-a-georgia-toddler/>
Washington Post columnist Radley Balko. In the case of the reverend, in
which the GBI investigated and cleared
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/02/23/jury-awards-more-than-2-million-to-family-of-pastor-killed-by-narcotics-task-force/>
agents of wrongdoing and said they followed appropriate procedures, his
family eventually won a $2.3 million settlement
<https://www.ajc.com/news/jury-awards-widow-million-pastor-wrongful-death-suit/rpn5WnROnnDtWyeBJ92kjI/>
against the officer
<https://www.gainesvilletimes.com/news/judge-oks-832k-in-legal-fees-in-preacher-shooting-case/>
who shot him. These cases left Balko with the following conclusion
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/02/23/jury-awards-more-than-2-million-to-family-of-pastor-killed-by-narcotics-task-force/>:
“The Georgia Bureau of Investigation probably shouldn’t be trusted to
conduct unbiased, thorough investigations of other law enforcement
officers.”
The GBI and Wrongful Convictions

The GBI has a mixed record in cases involving wrongful convictions, sometimes
failing to pursue obvious leads or otherwise mishandling an investigation. In
1979, testimony from a GBI agent helped send John White
<https://www.innocenceproject.org/cases/john-jerome-white/> to prison for a
rape, burglary, and robbery that he did not commit. Later, GBI helped with
White’s exoneration; he was released in 2007 after serving more than 20
years of a life sentence.

In the case of Kerry Robinson
<https://www.georgiainnocenceproject.org/cases/exonerees/kerry-robinson/>,
who was released in January on a wrongful conviction after serving close to
18 years of a 20-year sentence, a GBI DNA analyst provided “inaccurate and
overstated testimony,” according to the Georgia Innocence Project.

Perhaps the most troubling of recent examples is the 1999 wrongful
indictment of Devonia Inman, whose case is the subject of a podcast
<https://theintercept.com/podcasts/murderville/> and a series of articles
<https://theintercept.com/series/murderville/> by The Intercept’s Liliana
Segura and Jordan Smith. Inman has been in prison since the day before his
23rd birthday for the murder of Donna Brown, even though the GBI has matched
<https://www.ajc.com/news/local/judge-refuses-dismiss-man-claims-wrongful-conviction-murder/HxDDyIcrkmjBo8RwxzY39H/>
DNA found at the scene of the crime to another man. The person whose DNA
the GBI identified went on to kill at least two other people and is
currently serving a federal life sentence without parole.

Like with Arbery, the GBI’s involvement in Inman’s case was initially seen
as a step in the right direction. In the early 2000s, the GBI was ahead of
local police regarding access to new DNA technology and “routinely” took
over cases in South Georgia’s rural towns, The Intercept reported
<https://theintercept.com/2018/12/06/murderville-georgia-who-killed-donna-brown/>
.

Inman’s is “a story about racism, bad policing, and people who looked the
other way,” Segura and Smith say in the “Murderville” podcast. Much of the
same can be said of Arbery’s.
The Arbery Case

The GBI entered Arbery’s case after Brunswick-area police dismissed it, and
one prosecutor deemed the killing “perfectly legal.”

Having reviewed the tape, Waycross Judicial Circuit District Attorney
George Barnhill the day after the killing told
<https://www.ajc.com/news/district-attorneys-condemn-recused-prosecutor-ahmaud-arbery-case/VWV86naEbd9eprgOCSWwRJ/>
the
first prosecuting attorney’s office that he thought it was justified, AJC
reported. The two district attorneys, including Brunswick DA Jackie
Johnson, recused themselves from the case — McMichael had worked under
Johnson’s direction with Barnhill’s son to prosecute Arbery two years ago.

In a widely circulated letter
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6884019-Waycross-DA-Letter-on-Arbery-Shooting-Jp.html>
from April 1 to the Glynn County police captain, Barnhill said he saw no
grounds to arrest the McMichaels, that Arbery was “aggressive” and capable
of the crime, and that his family was “not strangers to the local criminal
justice system,” using the deceased’s mental health and a previous
conviction to paint that picture. Michael Mears, an associate professor at
Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School, said more scrutiny should be put on
both prosecutors, particularly Johnson, who has protected violent police
officers in other cases.

The attempts to smear Arbery continued after the video of his killing was
released. When one video showed Arbery at a home under construction in the
neighborhood, right-wing and even some mainstream outlets used it in an
attempt to support the McMichaels’s claim that they believed Arbery was a
suspect in a string of burglaries. Those looking to justify his killing
used the opportunity to try to poke holes in the shooting video.

Georgia criminal defense attorneys are approaching the GBI’s involvement in
the Arbery case with cautious optimism.

Georgia criminal defense attorneys are approaching the GBI’s involvement in
the Arbery case with cautious optimism, drawing contrasts to its
controversial past and pointing to Vic Reynolds, the agency’s new director,
who has made <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FePqN1dmbwQ&feature=youtu.be>
public assurances that the investigation, and the organization as a whole,
would operate professionally.

When asked why people should trust the GBI to hold its own accountable in
this case, and what the agency has done recently to combat suspicion given
its record in cases detailed above, Nelly Miles, a GBI spokesperson,
pointed to Reynolds’s May 9 press conference
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FePqN1dmbwQ&feature=youtu.be>, where he
recounted how the agency moved swiftly to arrest the McMichaels and said he
understood concerns from the community and across the country as to whether
others would be charged. “I will tell you that this case is an active,
ongoing investigation,” Reynolds said.

[image: BRUNSWICK, GA - MAY 08: Demonstrators protest the shooting death of
Ahmaud Arbery at the Glynn County Courthouse on May 8, 2020 in Brunswick,
Georgia. Gregory McMichael and Travis McMichael were arrested the previous
night and charged with the murder of Arbery. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty
Images)]
<https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/05/edit_GettyImages-1212200622.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90>

Demonstrators protest the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery at the Glynn
County Courthouse on May 8, 2020 in Brunswick, Georgia.

Photo: Sean Rayford/Getty Images

Another factor differentiating the Arbery case from GBI’s usual docket, two
lawyers told The Intercept, is that the agency is tasked with holding
accountable the network of people who covered up and dismissed Arbery’s
killing, not just those who actually carried it out.

“I think everyone was relieved to see the GBI get involved,” said criminal
defense attorney Page Pate, “just because they didn’t have direct
relationships with the potential suspects in the case.”
The Long Road to Justice

Georgia’s need to grapple
<https://civilrights.org/2020/05/14/justice-department-must-investigate-ahmaud-arberys-murder/>
with Arbery’s killing comes against the backdrop of a long and dark history
violence against black people in Georgia — including decades-old lynchings
that remain unsolved.

A 1946 case involving a summer ambush and murder of two black couples, Mae
and George Dorsey, and Roger and Dorothy Malcom, who were shot more than 60
times, their bodies further mutilated after being left at an unsecured
crime scene, is one example. No one was ever prosecuted for the lynching
<https://morristowngreen.com/2020/03/31/morris-lawyer-striving-to-solve-1946-lynching-vows-supreme-court-appeal/>,
which the GBI and FBI deemed a cold case. An eyewitness who was 10 years
old at the time said <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOpPPxu649I> a
Georgia police officer participated in the killing, and that he saw a
police patrol car at the bridge when it happened, the AJC reported in 2017.
Investigators never verified his claim — even as the FBI convened a 16-day
grand jury and conducted 2,790 interviews.

Journalist Anthony Pitch in 2016 wrote an exhaustive book on the case, “The
Last Lynching: How a Gruesome Mass Murder Rocked a Small Georgia Town,”
replete with examples of relationships between the 1946 grand jurors and
people who testified before them. (1946 was also the first year that black
people could vote in Georgia’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. Maceo
Snipes <https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/us/18land.html> was the only
black person to vote that day in his district, and the first ever in Taylor
County. The next day, men thought to be members of the Klu Klux Klan found
<https://coldcases.emory.edu/maceo-snipes/> him at his grandfather’s
farmhouse and shot him. His shooter was acquitted on claims of
self-defense, and the federal investigation was closed in 2010.)

In March of this year, a federal court ruled
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/us/Moores-ford-lynching-Georgia.html>
that the records in the case must remain under seal. The attorney on the
case, who took it up at Pitch’s request, is planning to appeal it to the
U.S. Supreme Court.

The legal system at the time made it fairly easy for lynchings to continue
unpunished. In 1938, eight years before the lynching that Pitch would later
describe as Georgia’s last, the state’s two Democratic senators
successfully tanked a federal anti-lynching bill
<https://www.ajc.com/news/opinion/opinion-russell-name-should-not-halls-justice/rXec8GMYfFbj6z44k523lJ/>
that, with 70 sponsors, had some potential. Sen. Richard Russell, a former
governor who had also stymied an earlier version of the bill, said the
proposal was a top priority of the Communist agenda, lynching was on its
way out, and that the law would portray an image to the world that
Southerners were “a clan of barbarians,” Pitch wrote in his book.

More than 80 years later, even as public consciousness has grown around
state-sanctioned anti-black violence, Congress
<https://www.harris.senate.gov/news/press-releases/senators-harris-booker-scott-lead-unanimous-passage-of-federal-anti-lynching-legislation>
continues to debate anti-lynching measures
<https://www.harris.senate.gov/news/press-releases/senators-harris-booker-scott-lead-unanimous-passage-of-federal-anti-lynching-legislation>.
Largely symbolic, the bills would establish a new federal criminal civil
rights violation and subsequent penalties for lynching. One passed
<https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/488/actions?q=%7B%22search%22:[%22Justice+for+Victims+of+Lynching+Act%22]%7D&r=1&s=1&KWICView=false>
the Senate on a voice vote early last year, and another
<https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/35> passed the
House in February.

Still, little has been done to hold perpetrators of racist violence
accountable. Even in highly publicized cases of killings of black people in
recent years, few people have been held responsible.

“I don’t think what happened in the Arbery case is necessarily that
unusual. I think a light was shined on it, and it was exposed,” said
Rapping of John Marshall. “And I think bringing the GBI in was an attempt
to put a lid on a pot that was bubbling over.”
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