The 36-year-old man who fatally shot Ahmaud Arbery was sentenced Monday to life plus 10 years in prison on federal hate crime charges.
A judge also required that Travis McMichael serve his sentence in state prison, not federal prison, as had been requested by his attorney.
The sentencing of McMichael is the first of three back-to-back for the men involved in the attack.
McMichael’s father, Greg McMichael, 66, and neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, 52, also are scheduled to be sentenced Monday.
The men, who are all white, were found guilty in February on federal hate crimes charges in the killing of Arbery, a Black man who was running in their neighborhood when the defendants confronted him in February 2020. The three men were convicted of all of the federal charges against them, including hate crimes, attempted kidnapping, and using a firearm to commit a crime.
The federal case followed a state trial in November in which the men were convicted of murder and given life sentences. They have appealed their convictions in that case.
The federal hate crimes trial centered on the history of the three men and their racial bias, a motive that prosecutors in the state case largely avoided, even though Arbery’s killing gained national attention as the United States was reckoning with systemic institutional racism and bias in policing.
