On the initiative of Thano Paris, state committee member and a former co-chair of the Georgia Party, members of the Georgia Party leadership sought to engage with and support the #IRunWithAhmaud effort to demand justice for the lynching death of Ahmaud Arberey, murdered in the streets of Brunswick Georgia on February 23rd.
After consultation with a meeting of the state committee, current state committee members Thano Paris and Hugh Esco, along with former state party chairman Rev. Zack Lyde, of Brunswick Georgia, have been participating in regular conference calls with local organizers in Georgia’s Waycross Judicial Circuit. Green party participants have been providing technical assistance and support to the Recall Barnhill campaign which seeks to give voters of the six-county district an opportunity to remove their district attorney from office.
Barnhill is one of the three District Attornies (from the Waycross, Brunswick and Atlantic Judicial Circuits) who abused their prosecutorial discretion to deny the family of Mr. Abrbery the equal protection of the law, leaving it to the Georgia Attorney General to assign prosecutors from Northwest Georgia to step in and prosecute the case being braught now against Gregory McMichael, his son Travis McMichael, and William “Roddie” Bryan Jr (who shot the video documenting the crime).
Early meetings of the coalition organized to perfect and refile the recall application earlier rejected. These meetings also engaged Decatur based election attorney Bryan Sells, particularly on an effort to overturn the district residency requirement restricting who is eligible to circulate a recall petition. The Georgia Recall Act required residency in the district the subject of a recall among recall petitition circulators. Last week, Sells filed litigation to overturn that requirement (motion for temporary restraining order). In a Federal Court Order signed Friday, June 19th, Judge Lee Martin May struck down the provision in a Consent Judgement among the parties.
While Party officers continue to urge Georgia Greens willing to travel to invest time and energy in Georgia’s Eighth Congressional District to help put our nominee Jimmy Cooper on the Congressional ballot before the August 14th filing deadline, we also encourage those inclined to help with this recall effort in the Waycross Judicial Circuit. The forty-five day petitioning window opens today, June 22nd, 2020. A successful petition will require 21,998 valid petitions (30% of those registered and qualified to vote in the last election in 2018).