[The history of the GBI, established in 1937, is interwoven with
the history of the Ku Klux Klan, which was a terrorizing force in
Georgia in the mid-20th century. ] [[link removed]]

THE TROUBLING HISTORY OF THE GEORGIA BUREAU NOW INVESTIGATING THE
AHMAUD ARBERY COVER-UP  
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Akela Lacy
May 14, 2020
The Intercept
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_ The history of the GBI, established in 1937, is interwoven with the
history of the Ku Klux Klan, which was a terrorizing force in Georgia
in the mid-20th century. _

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When the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced last week that it
would be probing the Glynn County Police Department’s dismissal of
the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, some people breathed a sigh of relief.
It was a welcome development after the lynching of a 25-year-old black
man, whose white killers had been walking free for 74 days — even
though the entire incident was caught on tape. 

But those familiar with the GBI responded with warranted skepticism.
Sure, it was a step in the right direction. But at that point, almost
anything would have been. Local police and elected officials for over
two months had found reasons not to arrest either of the men —
Gregory and Travis McMichael — who chased and killed Arbery while he
was jogging. After all, one was their former colleague. The other, his
son. 

Hinesville District Attorney Tom Durden, the third prosecutor to take
on the case, formally requested
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the GBI’s assistance on May 5. It was a critical moment: The
disturbing graphic video of Arbery’s death had been broadcast on
national television and shared thousands of times, following
revelations that the Glynn County Police Department, where Gregory
McMichael once worked, and local district attorneys had gone to great
lengths to smear
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name and protect his killers. The public outcry that followed is the
reason the McMichaels were arrested at all. 

The GBI — which is generally revered throughout the state and is
often brought in to investigate police-involved shootings of current
or former officers, like Gregory McMichael, to get around conflicts of
interest — has repeatedly been accused of mishandling
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investigations — in some cases intentionally. The agency has botched
cases in which the investigating officers appeared to be motivated by
racism, leading to wrongful convictions. The agency has also
repeatedly failed to hold accountable and break up powerful networks
of officers who broke laws in the course of their work — causing and
covering up overwhelming violence. 

In Georgia, where the Klu Klux Klan
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once infiltrated every level of law enforcement, racism can play a
role in violent crimes and the way they are investigated. Arbery’s
case is no different: There are clear parallels to the lynch mobs that
routinely chased, tortured, and murdered black Americans from the time
of slavery through the 1960s. Between 1877 and 1950, more than 4,000
black people in the U.S. — including 589 people in Georgia — were
killed
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in lynchings. The KKK’s stranglehold over Georgia’s law
enforcement apparatus decades ago laid the groundwork for a
historically deadly relationship between the cops, white people, and
black people. The white supremacist underpinnings of U.S. law
enforcement continue to echo throughout the country, as shown by the
multiple other
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police-involved shootings
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and others murders
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that have taken place since Arbery was killed — and are being
covered up and drowned out during the ongoing pandemic. 

Some lawyers in the state are optimistic that the GBI’s new
director, former Cobb County DA and Chief Magistrate Judge Vic
Reynolds, will give the case the attention it deserves. Still, a
closer look at the agency’s record raises questions about whether it
can be trusted to do so.

“There are communities that absolutely are skeptical about whether
the GBI or whether any law enforcement agency is going to adequately
investigate its law enforcement brethren,” Jon Rapping, a professor
and director of the criminal justice certificate program at
Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School, told The Intercept. “That
suspicion undoubtedly is going to create a lot of skepticism about
whether the GBI is going to do justice in this case.”

The KKK and Georgia Cops

The history of the GBI, established in 1937, is interwoven with the
history of the Ku Klux Klan, which was a terrorizing force
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in Georgia in the mid-20th century. One of the earliest directors of
the GBI, who later served as an Atlanta police officer, Sam Roper, was
a local Klan leader when he took over the GBI
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after former Georgia Gov. Gene Talmadge won another reelection in
1946. Roper, whose links
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to the agency have been all but wiped from public records, later
recruited Klan members into his police department, Frederick Allen
wrote
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in the 1996 book, “Atlanta Rising.” Roper campaigned in support of
Talmadge’s 1946 reelection and planned to install Klan members in
“every Georgia County and pay him $125 a month to ‘assist’ the
local sheriff” after Talmadge won, Allen wrote. Roper left the GBI
shortly afterward and became
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an Imperial Wizard
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of the KKK in 1949
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Stetson Kennedy
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activist famous for infiltrating the Klan in the 1940s, wrote
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in his 1990 book that when Klan leader David Duke asked him who was
“running the Klan now,” he told Duke that it was the GBI’s
former director, Roper. “I know Roper all right!” Duke said. 

Over the years, including in one unsolved 1946 lynching
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case currently under plans for appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the
GBI and other Georgia law enforcement agencies have been accused of
improperly handling investigations, including those related to
Klan-linked killings
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history [[link removed]], the
agency has failed to hold police accountable for deadly violence —
or for detaining, arresting, and extrajudicially killing people, many
of whom were bystanders. (Just last year, the GBI investigated 84
cases of officer-involved shootings, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
reported
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The agency does not track officers who were disciplined or charged in
those cases.) 

In two
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recent cases that cost local governments over $3 million in
settlements
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the GBI failed to adequately investigate a narcotics task force that
conducted a violent 2014 raid
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that put an infant in a burn unit under a medically induced coma, and
killed
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a reverend in 2009. In both cases, the GBI cleared
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agents of wrongdoing, even blaming the reverend for his own killing.
In the case of  the 2014 raid, which the GBI at the time denied
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local task force had approved — the agency, a former district
attorney, and a grand jury failed to find “what the feds found —
that this entire raid was based on a series of lies,” wrote
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Washington Post columnist Radley Balko. In the case of the reverend,
in which the GBI investigated and cleared
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agents of wrongdoing and said they followed appropriate procedures,
his family eventually won a $2.3 million settlement
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against the officer
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who shot him. These cases left Balko with the following conclusion
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“The Georgia Bureau of Investigation probably shouldn’t be trusted
to conduct unbiased, thorough investigations of other law enforcement
officers.” 

The GBI and Wrongful Convictions

The GBI has a mixed record in cases involving wrongful
convictions, sometimes failing to pursue obvious leads or otherwise
mishandling an investigation. In 1979, testimony from a GBI
agent helped send John White
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for a rape, burglary, and robbery that he did not commit. Later, GBI
helped with White’s exoneration; he was released in 2007 after
serving more than 20 years of a life sentence. 

In the case of Kerry Robinson
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who was released in January on a wrongful conviction after serving
close to 18 years of a 20-year sentence, a GBI DNA analyst provided
“inaccurate and overstated testimony,” according to the Georgia
Innocence Project.

Perhaps the most troubling of recent examples is the 1999 wrongful
indictment of Devonia Inman, whose case is the subject of a podcast
[[link removed]] and a series of
articles [[link removed]] by The
Intercept’s Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith. Inman has been in
prison since the day before his 23rd birthday for the murder of
Donna Brown, even though the GBI has matched
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DNA found at the scene of the crime to another man. The person whose
DNA the GBI identified went on to kill at least two other people and
is currently serving a federal life sentence without parole. 

Like with Arbery, the GBI’s involvement in Inman’s case was
initially seen as a step in the right direction. In the early 2000s,
the GBI was ahead of local police regarding access to new DNA
technology and “routinely” took over cases in South Georgia’s
rural towns, The Intercept reported
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Inman’s is “a story about racism, bad policing, and people who
looked the other way,” Segura and Smith say in the “Murderville”
podcast. Much of the same can be said of Arbery’s. 

The Arbery Case

The GBI entered Arbery’s case after Brunswick-area police dismissed
it, and one prosecutor deemed the killing “perfectly legal.”

Having reviewed the tape, Waycross Judicial Circuit District Attorney
George Barnhill the day after the killing told
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first prosecuting attorney’s office that he thought it was
justified, AJC reported. The two district attorneys, including
Brunswick DA Jackie Johnson, recused themselves from the case —
McMichael had worked under Johnson’s direction with Barnhill’s son
to prosecute Arbery two years ago. 

In a widely circulated letter
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from April 1 to the Glynn County police captain, Barnhill said he saw
no grounds to arrest the McMichaels, that Arbery was “aggressive”
and capable of the crime, and that his family was “not strangers to
the local criminal justice system,” using the deceased’s mental
health and a previous conviction to paint that picture. Michael Mears,
an associate professor at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School, said
more scrutiny should be put on both prosecutors, particularly Johnson,
who has protected violent police officers in other cases.

The attempts to smear Arbery continued after the video of his killing
was released. When one video showed Arbery at a home under
construction in the neighborhood, right-wing and even some mainstream
outlets used it in an attempt to support the McMichaels’s claim that
they believed Arbery was a suspect in a string of burglaries. Those
looking to justify his killing used the opportunity to try to poke
holes in the shooting video. 

Georgia criminal defense attorneys are approaching the GBI’s
involvement in the Arbery case with cautious optimism.

Georgia criminal defense attorneys are approaching the GBI’s
involvement in the Arbery case with cautious optimism, drawing
contrasts to its controversial past and pointing to Vic Reynolds, the
agency’s new director, who has made
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assurances that the investigation, and the organization as a whole,
would operate professionally. 

When asked why people should trust the GBI to hold its own
accountable in this case, and what the agency has done recently to
combat suspicion given its record in cases detailed above, Nelly
Miles, a GBI spokesperson, pointed to Reynolds’s May 9 press
conference
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he recounted how the agency moved swiftly to arrest the McMichaels and
said he understood concerns from the community and across the country
as to whether others would be charged. “I will tell you that this
case is an active, ongoing investigation,” Reynolds said.

Another factor differentiating the Arbery case from GBI’s usual
docket, two lawyers told The Intercept, is that the agency is tasked
with holding accountable the network of people who covered up and
dismissed Arbery’s killing, not just those who actually carried it
out. 

“I think everyone was relieved to see the GBI get involved,” said
criminal defense attorney Page Pate, “just because they didn’t
have direct relationships with the potential suspects in the
case.” 

The Long Road to Justice

Georgia’s need to grapple
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with Arbery’s killing comes against the backdrop of a long and dark
history violence against black people in Georgia — including
decades-old lynchings that remain unsolved.

A 1946 case involving a summer ambush and murder of two black couples,
Mae and George Dorsey, and Roger and Dorothy Malcom, who were shot
more than 60 times, their bodies further mutilated after being left at
an unsecured crime scene, is one example. No one was ever prosecuted
for the lynching
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which the GBI and FBI deemed a cold case. An eyewitness who was 10
years old at the time said
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participated in the killing, and that he saw a police patrol car at
the bridge when it happened, the AJC reported in 2017. Investigators
never verified his claim — even as the FBI convened a 16-day grand
jury and conducted 2,790 interviews.

Journalist Anthony Pitch in 2016 wrote an exhaustive book on the case,
“The Last Lynching: How a Gruesome Mass Murder Rocked a Small
Georgia Town,” replete with examples of relationships between the
1946 grand jurors and people who testified before them. (1946 was also
the first year that black people could vote in Georgia’s Democratic
gubernatorial primary. Maceo Snipes
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person to vote that day in his district, and the first ever in Taylor
County. The next day, men thought to be members of the Klu Klux Klan
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his grandfather’s farmhouse and shot him. His shooter was acquitted
on claims of self-defense, and the federal investigation was closed in
2010.)   

In March of this year, a federal court ruled
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that the records in the case must remain under seal. The attorney on
the case, who took it up at Pitch’s request, is planning to appeal
it to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

The legal system at the time made it fairly easy for lynchings to
continue unpunished. In 1938, eight years before the lynching that
Pitch would later describe as Georgia’s last, the state’s two
Democratic senators successfully tanked a federal anti-lynching bill
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that, with 70 sponsors, had some potential. Sen. Richard Russell, a
former governor who had also stymied an earlier version of the bill,
said the proposal was a top priority of the Communist agenda, lynching
was on its way out, and that the law would portray an image to the
world that Southerners were “a clan of barbarians,” Pitch wrote in
his book. 

More than 80 years later, even as public consciousness has grown
around state-sanctioned anti-black violence, Congress
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continues to debate anti-lynching measures
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Largely symbolic, the bills would establish a new federal criminal
civil rights violation and subsequent penalties for lynching. One
passed
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the Senate on a voice vote early last year, and another
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the House in February. 

Still, little has been done to hold perpetrators of racist violence
accountable. Even in highly publicized cases of killings of black
people in recent years, few people have been held responsible. 

“I don’t think what happened in the Arbery case is necessarily
that unusual. I think a light was shined on it, and it was exposed,”
said Rapping of John Marshall. “And I think bringing the GBI in was
an attempt to put a lid on a pot that was bubbling over.”

_Akela Lacy is a politics reporter. She was previously The
Intercept’s inaugural Ady Barkan Reporting Fellow; prior to that,
she was a politics fellow in the D.C. Bureau. She has also worked at
Politico, covering breaking news and immigration. She produced
Politico’s flagship newsletter, Playbook, and co-authored the
afternoon newsletter, Playbook PM. Prior to that, Lacy worked in
international reporting at the Pulitzer Center. She graduated from the
College of William and Mary with a B.A. in sociology and Italian. She
is based in New York._

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