ATLANTA — Jury selection is set to begin Monday in the federal hate crimes trial involving the three men convicted in the death of Ahmaud Arbery.
Gregory and Travis McMichael and their neighbor, William "Roddie" Bryan are facing federal charges nearly two years after Arbery was killed while going for a jog in the Satilla Shores neighborhood of Brunswick, Georgia. A jury found the three men guilty of several charges related to Arbery's death in November 2021.
It took weeks to seat a jury. A Georgia attorney said the task of seating an impartial jury will be tough again.
"It may very well be one of the hardest aspects of the trial," Attorney J. Thomas Salata said.
Salata said the challenges will be more likely in the southern district of Georgia than in a more metropolitan area, adding the defense will do its best to weed out the jurors that could make their job more difficult.
"They're gonna be looking for bias. They're going to talk to people, how well do you know about this? Do you know what happened? First of all, they're going to ask 'have you ever met these people?'" Salata said.
Salata said the true difficulty will be to balance an impartial jury, especially as attorneys sift through the hundreds of people who have been summoned to take on the nationally heated case.
"The next inquiry's gonna be, 'have you formed an opinion as to liability,' specifically criminal liability in this particular case and people may very say, 'yes I can't put that aside,'" he said.
The high-profile nature of the case is what will weigh heavy in the courtroom during jury selection, the attorney said. However, Salata believes simply knowing about the previous state trial that helped put McMichaels and Bryan in the spotlight won't be enough to eliminate a potential juror but bias for the men could be.
Salata said though the judge would have tried to cut down on potential jurors with a questionnaire prior to Monday's proceedings, it will still take a decent amount of time to seat 12 jurors and several alternates.
"One thousand people have been summoned, cut it down to 600, you're probably still looking at three or four weeks before you find an impartial jury," he said.