A Georgia jury resumed deliberating on Wednesday the fates of three white men charged with trapping Ahmaud Arbery with their pickup trucks and fatally shooting him.
"Your oath requires that you will decide this case based on the evidence," Judge Timothy Walmsley told the jury before sending the panel off to begin their deliberations on Tuesday.
The jury got the case after Linda Dunikoski, the Cobb County, Georgia, assistant district attorney appointed as a special prosecutor in the Glynn County case, took two hours to rebut the closing arguments made on Monday by attorneys for the three defendants.
The jury, comprised of 11 white people and one Black person, heard wildly different summations on Monday of the same evidence in the racially-charged case. Dunikoski alleged the defendants pursued and murdered Arbery because of wrong assumptions they made that the Black man running through their neighborhood had committed a burglary, while defense attorneys countered that Arbery was shot in self-defense when he resisted a citizen's arrest.
Travis McMichael, the 35-year-old U.S. Coast Guard veteran; his father, Gregory McMichael, 65, a retired Glynn County police officer, and their neighbor, William "Roddie" Bryan, 53, each face maximum sentences of life in prison if convicted on all the charges.
The defendants have pleaded not guilty to a nine-count state indictment that includes malice murder, multiple charges of felony murder, false imprisonment, aggravated assault with a 12-gauge shotgun and aggravated assault with their pickup trucks.
The McMichaels and Bryan were also indicted on federal hate crime charges in April and have all pleaded not guilty.