OPINION: The ugly past of Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law

February 25, 2021

OPINION: The ugly past of Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law

Gov. Brian Kemp announced his plans Tuesday for a major overhaul of the state’s citizen’s arrest law.

The law, which has remained essentially unchanged since Georgia first codified it in 1863, gives private citizens the authority to arrest other citizens if they witness a crime or the crime is within his immediate knowledge.

Last year, the Georgia law was wrongly used by a local Georgia prosecutor as an excuse not to arrest two white men suspected of killing Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man, as he was jogging through a Brunswick neighborhood.

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