Prosecutor Outlines Arbery Killers’ Use of Racial Slurs

The three white men are facing federal hate crime charges in Mr. Arbery’s death. In opening arguments, their lawyers said that they were motivated by concern about crime in their South Georgia neighborhood.

BRUNSWICK, Ga. — The prosecutor in the federal hate crimes trial for the men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery began her case on Monday with a raw litany of the defendants’ past expressions of racism, key evidence in the government’s case that the men chased Mr. Arbery through their Georgia neighborhood because he was Black.

The racist statements detailed in court on Monday were not directed at Mr. Arbery himself. But they were exceptionally harsh, a fact that even defense lawyers acknowledged. Bobbi Bernstein, a lawyer with the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said that among other evidence of racism, the government planned to show that Travis McMichael, the man who fatally shot Mr. Arbery, had referred to Black people as “animals,” “criminals,” “monkeys” and “subhuman savages.”

The ugliness of such evidence was widely anticipated, having been hinted at in court filings in the earlier state trial. In that case, the three white men — Mr. McMichael, 36, his father, Gregory McMichael, 66, and their neighbor William Bryan, 52 — were given life sentences, with the McMichaels denied the possibility of parole.