“Ahmaud Arbery was murdered,” said Judge Timothy Walmsley with the solemnity befitting the Chatham County Superior Court in Brunswick, Georgia.

“A resident of Glynn County, a graduate of Brunswick High, a son, a brother, a young man with dreams was gunned down in this community,” Walmsley continued. “As we understand it, he left his home apparently to go for a run and he ended up running for his life.”
Although both men were veterans with unblemished records, each was charged with felony murder and denied bond.
So saying, Walmsley summed up what the jury was allowed to know about Arbery, 25, at the time of his February 2020 death in the coastal community of Satilla Shores, Georgia. Either out of fear or ambition or some combination of the two, Walmsley had grossly misrepresented the reality of Arbery’s troubled life and death to justify the draconian sentences he was about to hand down to the men who “murdered” him — Greg McMichael, then 64, his son Travis, 34, and their neighbor Roddie Bryan, 50 .
Unknown to the jurors, America was entering its 10th year in the era of woke justice, an all but unremarked break from the leftist past. Historically, to highlight racial injustice, real or imagined, leftists had made a practice of romanticizing the guilty — Sacco and Vanzetti, Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal etc. — and proclaiming their innocence.
The 2012 arrest of George Zimmerman for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin signaled a dark turn in American history. With the tacit support of Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, activists now felt free to frame innocent citizens and proclaim their guilt. Mob-dictated and media-driven, woke justice would indict the not guilty, almost all of them white, in case after case for the next decade and more.
The year 2020 would see a major escalation in the woke reign of judicial terror.  Appropriately perhaps, the troubles for Travis McMichael, a Coast Guard veteran turned escort boat pilot, began on January 1 of that fateful yea...