One of the reputable African-American law firms in the United States, which is composed of Stewart Trial Attorneys based in Atlanta, has been saddled with the responsibility of handling the gruesome killing case of Ahmaud Arbery.
It would be recalled that in a viral video that shows the murder of Arbery, he was being shot down twice by retired district attorney investigator Greg McMichael and his son Travis McMichael. The men who claimed they saw Arbery running and confronted him with a belief that he was trying to escape from a crime scene.
The Atlanta-based attorney in partnership with S. Lee Merritt and Benjamin Crump, is up to represent the Arbery family.
Founder of the Law firm, L. Chris Stewart, is known for handling numerous cases spanning through civil rights, shootings, sexual assaults, and wrongful death, according to BlackBusiness.com.
Although Stewart has been successful in the civil rights space, it wasn’t his focus originally.
Stewart told Black Enterprise:
“I’m actually a wrongful death and catastrophic injury lawyer and we’ve just handled civil rights cases as they came along, “but there were so many cases in this country like this we’ve taken on.”
With Stewart’s expertise description, civil rights-related cases have also passed through the table of the respected Law firm to be handled.
Stewart was the recipient for the 2019 Southern Center For Human Rights Vanguard Award, the 2018 Julia Humbles’ Civil Rights Award, the National Bar Association’s Wiley Branton Award for Leadership.
Attorneys at the firm include Associate Trial Attorney Michael Roth, Attorney of Counsel Joshua Palmer, and Senior Associate Attorney Daedrea Fenwick.
The firm prides in high-profile wins on its résumé, which includes the the first-ever billion-dollar jury verdict in the U.S. history for a rape victim. The lawyers at the firm had also won a record $5.1 million negligent security settlement.
The firm won a $6.5 million settlement with South Carolina for the shooting of Walter Scott in 2015 by Michael Slager, who was a South Carolina police officer.
Meanwhile, it was the Law firm that represented some of the nation’s highest-profile civil rights death cases, such as Alton Sterling, who got killed on a video by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
In Stewart’s statement to Black Enterprise, fighting for civil right cases in the court is not always easy.
“There is progress but the problem is there are so many laws against civil rights,” Stewart said.
With the shooting assaults on Black Americans amid the COVID-19 pandemic, it was apparent that murder charges of Arbery were put on hold with respect to two different prosecutors recusing themselves from the case, with the third attorney backing out within the space of two months of his killing. But, justice for his murder got quickened when trolls and protests were flying over social media by the Black communities in the U.S to bring his killers to book.
