ATLANTA — A federal judge on Monday rejected a plea deal from one of the three white men facing federal hate-crimes charges for the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, 25, the Black man who was chased through a Georgia neighborhood and fatally shot, court documents show.
The man, Travis McMichael, 36, had agreed to plead guilty, admitting for the first time that he had attacked Mr. Arbery because of his race.
But the judge rejected the agreement that Mr. McMichael had reached with the Department of Justice after strenuous opposition from Mr. Arbery’s family, who objected to the fact that it allowed Mr. McMichael to spend 30 years in federal prison, rather than in state prison.
“I’m asking on the behalf of his family, on behalf of his memory and on behalf of fairness that you do not grant this plea in order to allow these men to transfer out of Georgia state custody into the federal prisons where they prefer to be,” Wanda Cooper-Jones, Mr. Arbery’s mother, told the judge.
After rejecting the plea agreement, Judge Lisa Godbey Wood gave Mr. McMichael until Friday to decide whether to formally enter a guilty plea. She noted that Mr. McMichael’s father, Gregory McMichael, had been offered the same deal and gave him, too, until Friday to decide whether to plead guilty.
Travis McMichael and Gregory McMichael, 66, were found guilty of murder along with a third man, William Bryan, 52, in a Georgia state court in November.
Federal prosecutors argued on Monday that Mr. McMichael did not set out to hurt a Black person that day — but that he made racist assumptions about Ahmaud Arbery based on his skin color. Skylar Barnes, a special agent with the F.B.I., testified that there was evidence of racial animus on Travis’s phone, including frequent racial slurs.
The case was widely viewed as an act of racial violence. But while prosecutors in the state trial had considered introducing what they described as “racial” evidence, including inflammatory Facebook posts and text messages from the three men, they ultimately touched only lightly on racial themes in making their case to the nearly all-white jury.
On Sunday, federal prosecutors filed notice in U.S. District Court asking a judge to approve plea agreements for the McMichaels. Specific details about the plea deals were not included in the court filings. Nor was there any indication that an agreement had been struck with Mr. Bryan, who was involved in chasing Mr. Arbery through the neighborhood near Brunswick, Ga., in February 2020.
Ms. Cooper-Jones, denounced the pleas. In an interview late Sunday, Ms. Cooper-Jones said of the federal prosecutors: “They went behind my back. I’m totally, totally upset. My anxiety is over the roof.”
She said that federal officials had asked her earlier if she approved of a deal, and that she had told them no.
All three men were sentenced to life in prison by the state court. In the federal proceedings, the men are accused of hate-crime charges and attempted kidnapping, for which they face possible additional life sentences. Travis McMichael, who fired a shotgun at Mr. Arbery, also faces a weapons charge.
During the murder trial, lawyers for Travis McMichael — who fired his shotgun at Mr. Arbery three times at close range — had said that he had fired in self-defense.
Understand the Killing of Ahmaud Arbery
The shooting. On Feb. 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was shot and killed after being chased by three white men while jogging near his home on the outskirts of Brunswick, Ga. The slaying of Mr. Arbery was captured in a graphic video that was widely viewed by the public.
Ms. Cooper-Jones said she wanted the federal trial to take place in order to put the self-defense argument to rest and to firmly establish that the men had been motivated by racism.
Mr. Arbery was unarmed when the three men chased him for several minutes through Satilla Shores, a middle-class neighborhood along Georgia’s southern coast. They said they had suspected Mr. Arbery of committing property crimes in the area. In video footage of the encounter, Mr. Arbery could be seen running as his pursuers chased him in two pickup trucks.
The chase ended when Mr. Arbery and the younger Mr. McMichael met in a violent clash. Mr. Bryan captured the violence on a video clip that was widely disseminated on the internet, leading to a national outcry and allegations that the killing had amounted to a modern-day lynching.
It is unclear which pieces of evidence might be introduced in the federal trial. In a pretrial hearing, state prosecutors read a text message from November 2019 in which Travis McMichael used a racist slur about Black people as he described the idea of shooting a “crackhead” with “gold teeth.”
In a federal court filing in late December, the lawyer for Mr. Bryan asked the court to exclude evidence that suggested Mr. Bryan had “racial animus” toward Black people, including racially insensitive text messages he had made around the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and witness testimony “that would suggest Bryan did not approve of his adopted daughter dating an African American man.”
A Georgia state investigator has said that Mr. Bryan told the authorities that he heard Travis McMichael use a racist slur shortly after shooting Mr. Arbery. Mr. McMichael’s lawyers have disputed that claim.