By Sam Ozer-Staton

On Tuesday’s episode of CAFE Insider, Preet and Joyce discussed the recent grand jury indictment of three Georgia men in connection with the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was shot while jogging last February. The indictment caught the attention of legal observers, in part because the Justice Department took the unusual step of bringing federal charges in a case that had already been charged in state court. The indictment was notable for another reason: it charged the defendants with hate crimes.

Federal hate crime charges are notoriously difficult to bring. Of the thousands of hate crimes that are reported every year, precious few land in the hands of the federal government, and even fewer result in charges. The federal hate crimes statute, 18 U.S. Code §245(b), requires that prosecutors prove the defendant was motivated by intolerance towards “[A]ny person because of his race, color, religion or national origin.”

In the Arbery case, federal prosecutors brought additional charges that require a lower burden of proof, including attempted kidnapping charges against all three defendants, and two separate counts of using a firearm during a crime of violence. As Joyce explained this week on Insider, “The government bears the burden of proving racial animus beyond a reasonable doubt, which can be a real stumbling block in the federal cases. That’s probably why the kidnapping charge is there too.”