6:50 PM: Judge Walmsley said after a late Monday night, he’s inclined to wrap up today’s voir dire a little sooner. Those remaining from today’s pool would be brought back on another day. So lawyers and the judge began discussing who in the pool would be struck for cause. Some 40 minutes later, after a few denied defense motions and several jointly-agreed motions, the jury pool grew by four, bringing the total of now-qualified jurors to 36 of the needed 64.

Court resumes Wednesday morning at 8:30.

4:40 PM: A slew of jurors are struck for cause after very brief questioning.

3:55 PM: As Juror #479 was being questioned, Wanda Cooper-Jones left the courtroom, sobbing. During questioning by the defense, she said she has children, and if something like this happened to her child, she would want answers.

“If they’re guilty, they’re guilty,” said Juror #479.

Juror 479 notes she has rights, including the right to walk down the sidewalk.

“I have the right to go to the grocery store,” she said. “Somebody may not want me to go to the grocery store. Do I have rights?”

Around this time, Ms. Cooper-Jones walked out, crying.

Juror #479 appears to be a Black woman, a senior who is the only person today who says she wants to serve on this jury. Does she have an opinion in this case? “We want to see justice done. I want everything to be fair, that’s my opinion. Everybody’s due their day in court,” she replies.

She adds that if the defendants are guilty, they should be punished.

“It won’t bring him back, but at least it would let people know you can’t just do people any kind of way,” said juror No. 479.

She says she would listen and consider a self-defense/citizen’s arrest argument at trial, and consider all testimony. Would you be able to render a verdict based solely on the evidence you hear within these four walls? “Yes, sir.”

The juror believes people of color are treated unfairly in the criminal justice system, and offered an example. Her son, she told the court, was in a Brunswick store washing his hands. Police were called, and told him to leave. He ended up being maced by the officer, arrested, and jailed for eight days, she said.

“I’ll listen. But you listen with your heart and your mind,” she said when asked about serving as a juror

Why do you want to be on this jury?, she was asked.

“I believe I can bring peace out of the storm,” she said. “We as a community are supposed to love one another and there’s got to be some peace.”

Asked about the amount of time that lapsed between Arbery’s shooting and the arrest of the suspects, “Nothing was done.” she said. “To me, it’s like it was swept under the rug.”

Juror #479 also believes the old Georgia flag is a racist symbol.

“Any time discrepancies come, I see those flags,” she said. “And they’re not on clean vehicles...

It’s like it belongs to one race.”

Judge Walmsley asked Juror 479 if she already had an opinion.

“Your Honor, I believe everybody saw the tape. So we know somebody shot him,” Juror 479 said. “I don’t know what brought it all about … You need to hear all the facts.”

Juror No. 475 appears to be a young white man who sums up what he knows of the case as “I just think that it was a bad set of circumstances. Yeah, they shot him in the street. Cut him off.” This comes from watching the video of the fatal chase and talking with friends.

He says he would hold the State to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and follow the judge’s instructions. Also said he would consider defense’s citizen’s arrest and self-defense claims.

Juror #475 says that the video is pretty “burned into” his memory.

“It seemed pretty rough, pretty gruesome when slowed down,” said the juror. He told the defense that he’s heard all kinds of opinions, including some from people who know defendant Bryan. Some people believe “they shouldn’t have been arrested at all,” and others think “they should be shipped off to Siberia.”

No. 475 suspects race was at play in Ahmaud Arbery’s chase.

“I think race does play a role in this case,” #475 said. “It was a Black guy in a white neighborhood. He got chased down by trucks and was shot in the street.”

He also researched the Stand Your Ground law, and thinks the defendants broke it.

“I felt like they broke the law. They weren’t in their yard. They were in the street and chased him down with guns,” said No. 475.

Juror #469 appears to be a white woman; she wrote on her questionnaire, “I think that Mr. Arbery was hunted down and killed unnecessarily. I do not believe it was because he was stealing or could have stolen anything. His hands were empty. He was jogging.”

She also said, “Mr. Arbery was gasping for air & no one helped him, cops included.” Asked how she knew that, she says she viewed the police bodycam video.

When she described how police arrived on the shooting scene and “stepped over” a gasping Ahmaud Arbery, Arbery’s mother gasped aloud in court.

She says “I can only try” to be fair.

Still, says #469, she has a negative view of the three defendants.

“What I’ve seen gives me an uneasy feeling and it just harbors inside of me, the depth of what happened. And it just bothers me.”

Juror 469 described the Roddie Bryan cellphone video: “I did see the firing of the gun. I saw the other gentleman jump out. He had a gun on him.”

She sighed when saying she saw cops arrive, and heard Ahmaud gasp for air.

“Nobody was doing anything. It bothered me,” she said. When she saw someone step over Arbery’s body, she says she felt “Awful, as a human, and a mother, and a citizen. Awful.”

No. 469 has a friend who lived directly across the street from Ahmaud Arbery and his mother.

“I didn’t know him at all,” she said. Juror #469 sometimes saw Arbery lifting weights across the street when she came to pick up her kids from friend’s house. She also understood Arbery to be a runner. She said she couldn’t say any more, because she didn’t know him.

“I don’t try to be biased. I don’t try to be any of those things,” she said, but in your heart and mind you can’t always get rid of some of those thoughts, she added.

1:45 PM: Juror #467 appears to be a Black man, and says he knows Ahmaud Arbery and his family.

He grew up with “Mr. Marc”--his name for Arbery’s father, Marcus, Sr.--and says he’s friends with both Marcus, Sr. and Marcus, Jr. They’ve shared dinners, oyster roasts, and card games, and says his close ties to the family would not make him an ideal, impartial juror.

“I wouldn’t want no parts of it,” says No. 467. “I’m sorry.”

Juror #467 explains that he could normally give the defendants a fair trial, but here, “It’s just...I know him [Arbery], and I just don’t want to put nobody away. That’s just not me.

“The videos, all I’ve seen...I couldn’t do it.”

He described this as “a racist case” and says while he has not formed a fixed opinion on guilt or innocence, he repeatedly reiterated that he does not want to serve on the jury. He has supported the Arbery family in social justice demonstrations and said he’d “Pass” when asked what the phrase “Justice for Ahmaud” means to him.

Juror #467 was struck for cause.

1:30 PM: Travis McMichael attorney Jason Sheffield offered a joint proposal to marry six of today’s jury panel to the eight leftovers from Day 1 of last week.

They know they are going to have a long night if they try to get through all of the potential jurors today, he tells the Court.

Judge Walmsley declined, but in an interesting note, Sheffield said in his pitch, “We are optimistic by the end of this week we will have reached what we need to do our selection.”

I told y’all on the radio more than once--if we kept averaging eight qualified jurors per day, we’d have our 64 needed. Smile.

1:15 PM: The court is reconvening after a lunch break. Before lunch, Juror #466, a white man, was questioned. He and wife know Leigh McMichael, the wife and mother of Greg and Travis McMichael, and is Facebook friends with their daughter, Lindsey. He says he would not give their testimony more weight, but believes that for another reason, he would not be a completely impartial juror.

“The only thing, it would put my wife in awkward situation,” said Juror No. 466. “If I were to sit on jury and it were a guilty verdict, I would put my wife in an impossible situation.”

He added, “I would like to think I could be impartial, but in the back of my mind, my wife supersedes objectivity.”

10:00 AM: “Ban all protest or First Amendment activity from this area until the conclusion of this trial.” That’s the request from Roddie Bryan’s lawyer Kevin Gough, who, for a third time in jury selection, is complaining about the semi-steady presence of pro-prosecution demonstrators outside the Glynn County courthouse.

Gough introduced into evidence aerial photographs of the courthouse showing crowds assembled outside last week as he asked the judge to investigate possible jury tampering in the ongoing trial. He also submitted news articles on the case and a photo of a Tweet by Lee Merritt, one of the Arbery family’s civil rights lawyers, that said: “Register to vote, show up for jury duty. Remember this phrase: I can be fair.”

Gough said if there is any evidence there has been an “unconscious or conscious” effort to tamper with the jury, something needs to be done about it. He proposes banning all demonstrations around the courthouse grounds while the trial is underway.

The attorney also introduced exhibits of tweets and Instagram posts from Merritt, including one in which Merritt called one juror’s qualification for the pool “a bad call.”

“We haven’t been scratched the surface of what’s out there on Black Twitter and in the Black media,” said Gough.

Prosecutor Linda Dunikoski told the judge that Gough should not conflate a third party’s free speech rights with the state’s presentation of the case. Dunikoski said that although she knows who Merritt is, she’s never spoken to him.

She also said, “There have been absolutely no jurors who said they’d seen any of these things,” she said. " These are all things that were pulled off the internet and printed out.”

Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley denied the motion to clear the courthouse grounds of demonstrators, pointing out again that those grounds are public property and that there have been no disturbances.

“When I came in this morning, I didn’t see anyone,” the judge said. “In fact, it’s been relatively quiet on the courthouse steps. I also checked in with the sheriff a couple times...no reported arrests, no issues.”

The judge also noted that as for outside “noise” regarding the case, it’s not just pro-conviction people speaking out in the media, “through interviews, podcasts, and a variety of other means. Now, I’m not going to suggest any--I’m not going to talk about intent or what that may’ve been, but both sides have done that.

“Both sides have been involved in raising the consciousness of the public as to what the issues might be in this case,” said Judge Walmsley.

He says reporters have been good about complying with orders regarding jury anonymity, and indicated his concern is if anyone else is making posts which could identify jurors or to influence their actions on the panel in any way.

“I will tell you, it troubles me,” Walmsley said. “Significantly.”

The defense moved into its motion to add a number of questions to its voir dire of potential jurors.

Judge Timothy Walmsley disallowed several of them.

One, for example, was whether jurors could be asked if they would entertain a defense of self-defense if any of the three defendants chose not to testify. There was also discussion of whether a juror could consider a self-defense argument if one of the people was unarmed.

But Walmsley is going to allow lawyers to aske these two questions during general questions: Have you supported the call for “Justice for Ahmaud” and “I Run With Maud?” Also, Will you follow the law that is given you by the Court, even if you think the law may be or should be different?

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