I Reckon: Justice is still delayed for Ahmaud Arbery
If you haven’t watched the Alex Murdaugh double murder trial at all this past month, I recommend you do — not only to listen to a grown man call his son “Paw-Paw” as a nickname, but also to see justice come crashing down on a powerful man from an equally powerful legal dynasty that thought they could escape it all. But, if you’re not into the legalese, I can sum this case, and the state of justice in the South, up for you in just one sentence, borrowing a few words from the esteemed Reba McEntire: “Don’t trust your soul to no backwoods Southern lawyer.”
Murdaugh’s case was speedy, wrapping up in just around 28 days — surprising considering the circumstances. The Murdaughs held political power in the South Carolina Lowcountry for generations, occupying the office of solicitor general until Alex Murdaugh fell off the nepotism wagon and ended nearly 87 years of single-family rule of the office. But this isn’t meant to be about the Murdaughs. The arm of the law crashed down on them and dealt a justified blow just about as quickly as you could expect the law to do in a trial with as much media frenzy behind it as the Murdaugh trial has.
No, this is about justice, still long denied. This is about Ahmaud Arbery. Although his murderers have been locked up, and the key has been tossed away (hopefully for good), there’s one person involved in his case that has yet to see her day in court for what she’s done, or rather — what she’s failed to do. That person is former local District Attorney Jackie Johnson.
Small-town corruption is not a phenomenon exclusively found in the South, but in a region still home to the Black Belt and generations of Black Americans, this phenomenon has disastrous consequences. Corruption of state and local judges is horrible in itself — especially when it comes to the sentencing phase of a court case. A Reuters investigation found that in the past 12 years alone, out of the thousands of cases that they reviewed involving judges who were repeatedly engaged in misconduct, 9 out of 10 judges were able to keep their jobs. But, on the other side of the bench, there’s another with arguably just as much power, and just as much discretion — district attorneys.
Jackie Johnson has still yet to be arraigned. She’s being charged with meddling in the investigation police conducted on the case. Generally, district attorneys are considered the top law enforcement in their respective counties, and while they’re not the uniformed cops and sheriffs you’d think of when you hear the words “law enforcement,” DAs work very closely with the police when they’re deciding whether or not to prosecute a crime. In Johnson’s case, she openly waded into a cesspool of conflicts of interest with her blinders on. One of the murderers, who had previously served as an investigator at the district attorney’s office, called her asking for advice the day after Arbery was murdered. Between then and May 5, 2020, they made an additional 16 calls to each other. I’d say that’s 16 too many. Before she eventually recused herself from the case, she asked a neighboring district attorney — who himself had previously undisclosed conflicts of interest — to review the shooting.
It shouldn’t be lost on us that, in Jackie Johnson’s case, we had a clear picture of a white district attorney dragging her feet and mucking up a serious case, all to give her white allies a bit of free time. White comfort finds itself at home in the Southern halls of justice, and the “good old boys” club that it breeds has unforgiving and brutal repercussions for those that find themselves a victim of this kind of culture. It’s going to take a long time and large, coordinated efforts to elect ethical DAs to districts all across the South — and across the nation, but in the meantime, I think the first step is to include prosecutors and district attorneys in the conversation about law enforcement accountability. If we can’t have upstanding uniformed law enforcement, we at least need decent, ethical district attorneys that know when to prosecute and recuse themselves. But when we have neither, we are in for a world of false convictions, seedy corruption and destroyed lives. And until Jackie Johnson sees her day in court, justice for Ahmaud Arbery and his family is delayed and denied.
Quynh Anh Nguyen is a junior writing about the implications of current Southern political events. Her column, “I Reckon,” runs every other Monday.