Three white men,  convicted in a state court of the brutal murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man they saw jogging through their suburban Brunswick, Ga., neighborhood on Feb. 23, 2020, are on trial in federal court.

Federal statutes allow for separate/additional prosecutions for crimes allegedly committed in violation of human-rights laws. 

Racial hatred motivated Arbury's attackers -- Gregory McMichael, 65, son Travis McMichael, 35, and neighbor William "Roddie" Bryan, 52 -- the prosecutor has charged.

In her opening statement prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein laid out the premise of the federal case: Ahmaud Arbery, she told the court, would not have been murdered had he been white.

Is the prosecutor playing "the race card" to sensationalize the case and play to Black sympathies? Is she unmasking the sheer brutality that lurks behind the illusion of well-ordered life?

On Leid Stories today we look at how the murder of Ahmaud Arbery lays bare the false notion of "progress" in the South.