Arbery Appeals, Convicted Cop Pensions

Thursday, March 9, 2023

---

Arbery killers dispute convictions

The three Glynn County men convicted of committing hate crimes by chasing and killing Ahmaud Arbery are appealing their federal convictions, according to court documents filed last week.

The appeals for Gregory McMichael, Travis McMichael and William Bryan, who are white, in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals contain legal arguments that race did not play a role in their decision to pursue Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was out on a run on Feb. 23, 2020.

“Every crime committed against an African American is not a hate crime,” an attorney for William Bryan wrote. “Every crime committed against an African American by a man who has used racist language in the past is not a hate crime.”

We dove into the legal filings and revisited the February 2022 federal trial, which resulted in the first successful hate crimes prosecution in Georgia history. 

---

Pensions for convicted cops

In a quiet and nearly empty Brunswick courtroom last week, the saga of a corrupt Glynn County police drug unit took another step towards completion. A former Glynn County police captain pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, after being caught up in allegations of his drug unit’s misconduct, which included sleeping with informants, lies and coverups.

The Current‘s Jake Shore was in the courtroom when former Glynn County Police Captain David Hassler pleaded guilty to obstruction of an officer. Former sergeant David Haney did as well two weeks prior, as part of two plea deals organized by South Georgia District Attorney Joe Mulholland.

Now, we’re learning more about whether Haney and Hassler are still permitted to collect taxpayer-funded pensions from Glynn County, in light of their pleas.

Both men have pensions with the county but that may change, according to Glynn County Board of Commissioners spokesperson Katie Baasen. She said the county attorney’s office is gathering information on their pleas first, before deciding on whether to send the matter to the county’s Pension Committee.

From there, the committee would decide whether their actions warranted them to lose their pension and the matter would then be sent to the Board of Commissioners for a final say, Baasen said.

“This is just the beginning of the process,” she said.

---

Guns in the country

How many guns are there in the U.S., and how do they correlate with gun deaths?

Our friends at The Trace tried to answer those questions and show why it’s difficult to say definitively because of missing data and spotty regulations.

Some interesting answers include:

• U.S gun manufacturers produced 9 million firearms a year on average between 2016 and 2020. Imports were at 5 million a year on average.
• The number of guns manufactured fluctuates with big changes in the U.S. political space, like the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. But the biggest increase in guns in the population occurred between 2019 and 2020, when Americans bought 40 million guns as the pandemic gripped the nation.
• The Trace compared gun manufacturing data and gun death data. They cautioned that correlation does not mean causation, however, the outlet noted “in many instances, gun deaths and production peaked in the same year.” The stronger relationship, they reported, was between handgun production and suicides.

The Trace also included its gun violence tracker, which uses data from the Gun Violence Archive to show how shootings affect our communities.

Here’s a look at Savannah and Brunswick.

---

Have a question, comment or story idea? Send me an email at jakeshore.thecurrent@gmail.com.

---

---

Support non-partisan, solutions-based investigative journalism without bias, fear or favor on issues affecting Savannah and Coastal Georgia.