Lee Merritt is tired of fighting for dead Black people. That’s why he’s running for Texas attorney general

Born into gang culture, raised in the LA riots and cemented as a household name in the Ahmaud Arbery case, Lee Merritt tells Rachel Sharp how his experiences with racial inequality and the criminal justice system led him to take on the race for Texas attorney general

Lee Merritt with Ahmaud Arbery’s mother Wanda Cooper-Jones and Rev. Al Sharpton (from right to left) outside the courthouse in Georgia after the Black jogger’s three killers were found guilty of murder (Getty Images)

Lee Merritt is fed up with fighting for justice for dead Black people.

Jordan Edwards. Atatiana Jefferson. Botham Jean. Marvin Scott. George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery. Ronald Greene.

The high-profile civil rights attorney has made his career in representing a long line of Black men and women who have died as a result of police brutality and racial violence.

This last year, he became something of a household name representing the family of Ahmaud Arbery, the Black 25-year-old jogger who was chased through a Georgia neighbourhood and shot dead by three white men in February 2020.

But, Mr Merritt says the more high-profile cases he takes, the more his phone doesn’t stop ringing with calls from other families sharing similar stories of what has happened to their loved ones.

“I’m always terrified of going into my office at the end of cases like these as my email is just filled with similar stories from all across the country. Ahmaud Arbery happened 365 times last year,” he tells The Independent.

“I don’t want to just be famous for defending people killed by police.

“I want to stop it happening in the first place and want to make adjustments to the system to stop it because it doesn’t need to keep happening.”

It’s for this very reason that the 39-year-old is now running to become the first Black attorney general in Texas history.

Entering the race as a Democrat, Mr Merritt hopes to take on incumbent Ken Paxton - a Donald Trump ally who peddled false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election - in what is a historically red state.

Early voting in the primaries opened on 14 February and Mr Merritt is confident he is going to win the race.

“It’s going to happen,” he says. “Texas isn’t red, it’s just suppressed.”

Born into gang culture

Mr Merritt is well aware that his life could have turned out very differently.

His father was a member of the notorious Rollin 60s Crips gang and spent much of his childhood in and out of prison.

He watched as every Black man in his family and local community in Los Angeles wound up in the criminal justice system.

He seemed destined to follow in their footsteps himself when he ended up in the juvenile system as a teen after being kicked out of school twice - once for carrying a gun and once when his brothers beat up the principal.

“I was born into gang culture. My dad has been incarcerated for most of his life and my mother was a teenage mom,” he says.

“I grew up in a community where it was just normal for every Black male to go to jail, where it was just expected that every Black male would do some time inside.

“My granddad went to jail, my dad, my uncles, my brothers now have the label ‘felon’.”

Mr Merritt saw from a young age the toll the criminal justice system takes on communities of colour and quickly became aware of racial inequality and police brutality against Black people.

As a Black kid growing up in LA in the 1990s, he had watched the footage of Rodney King being violently beaten by LAPD officers and saw the city erupt in riots when his attackers were acquitted of all charges.

“It was a volatile time in LA - with Rodney King’s assault, the LA riots and the anti-apartheid movement,” he recalls.

When his family moved to Florida during middle school, his awareness of racial inequality only increased.

There, he was expelled the first time for “carrying a gun to school for protection” in eighth grade.

The family then moved even deeper south to Chiefland, a 20 minute drive from the site of the Rosewood massacre - where a white mob killed as many as 200 Black people and burned the town to the ground.

The scars of that racist attack of 1923 were still very much alive there.

“There were still Klan rallies going on when I lived there,” says Mr Merritt.

“I was an urban kid and didn’t fit in so everything I did got me into trouble.

Lee Merritt grew up in LA at the time of the beating of Rodney King and the subsequent riots (Lee Merritt/Instagram)

“I was still getting pretty good grades when I was in class - but then my brothers jumped the principal and we all got kicked out for life.”

For a young Mr Merritt, he and his brothers only avoided being sent to a juvenile detention centre by being enrolled onto a marine programme instead.

When they graduated from the programme, he says authorities “didn’t know what to do” with them because they weren’t accepted back into local schools but weren’t deemed bad enough for what he describes as “the bad boy programmes”.

He ended up moving back to California to live with his grandmother in Pasadena where he became more involved in the church - something he credits for steering him away from gang life.

“The church represented a safe haven for me to say ‘I’m not going to be part of gang culture or drug culture. I’m going to sit that out’,” he explains.

“I was still going to school with members of a rival gang but the church was my safe haven and also exposed me to opportunities.”

While he was never in a gang himself, Mr Merritt admits he was “gang affiliated” during his youth.

“It would be silly for me to say I wasn’t involved in a gang when I was raised under one,” he says, adding: “But people don’t necessarily choose to gang bang.”

Despite getting into trouble as a kid, he says it was his firsthand experience of the criminal justice system through his father’s incarceration and his own brushes with the law that, in part, laid the foundations for his career path.

He was just eight years old when he decided he was going to become an attorney.

“I always knew I wanted to be a lawyer,” he says.

“If anything jarred me it was the assault on Rodney King. I saw the video over and over again and learned that there is such a thing as law and order and as a kid you break it down to something being unfair and that if it is unfair you should resolve it through the court.”

Footage of Rodney King being beaten by LAPD officers in 1991 (George Holliday/KTLA via AP)

He followed the cases of Johnnie Cochran who, representing people including LA riot beating victim Reginald Oliver Denny and former Black Panther Elmer ‘‘Geronimo’’ Pratt, became known as an early advocate for Black people who were victims of police violence.

Watching Denzel Washington play a Black lawyer in the movie Philadelphia also offered up important representation.

“I more or less had a one track mind for justice since the age of eight,” he says.

“My mother and my community did a good job of centering that, yes, inequality does exist but we also have an ability to try to bring it to an end.”

Fast forward to 2022 and Mr Merritt has spent years trying to do just that.

Waking the nation up

Mr Merritt caught up with The Independent in early February after a flying visit to Georgia.

He had heard that federal prosecutors were offering two of Arbery’s murderers a plea deal to move them out of state prison to comfier federal facilities.

Mr Merritt jumped on a plane and flew straight to Brunswick to join Arbery’s family in asking the court to respect the family’s wishes not to approve the agreement.

The judge rejected the plea deal.

As a result, all three killers are currently on trial for federal hate crime charges that they targeted and killed the Black jogger because of his race.

Mr Merritt explains that he and Arbery’s family were “extremely relieved” with the judge’s decision after they had gone through “such a long fight” to get justice.

“I don’t want to see this victory taken away from Ahmaud’s family and the Brunswick community,” he says.

Arbery was murdered back in February 2020 when Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William “Roddie” Bryan chased him through a neighbourhood and shot him dead in the street.

The three white men evaded justice for months with no arrests made.

It was only when footage of Arbery’s murder - filmed by Bryan - was leaked and public outrage swelled that the case was taken off the local county and charges were finally brought.

In November, the three killers were found guilty of murder at their state trial and were sentenced to life in prison - with no possibility of parole for the McMichaels.

Mr Merritt explains that, while the penalty cannot get any worse for the father and son duo, the federal trial is important to both Arbery’s family and the wider civil rights community - and that it has far wider implications than the outcome inside the courtroom.

Instead, he says it’s an opportunity to secure a “moral victory” as evidence will be presented about the killers’ alleged racist motivations for Arbery’s murder.

“We want them to confess or for the truth to come out on record that they were motivated by hate,” he says.

“That’s important in the civil rights community.”

A picture of Ahmaud Arbery is on display outside the Glynn County Courthouse in November (REUTERS)

It’s a case that has shone a spotlight on, not only what prosecutors say were the racist motivations of Arbery’s killers, but also the purported institutional racism in the local justice systems that saw the white murderers favoured over the Black victim.

As questions mounted over why the killers were able to escape justice for so long, accusations of coverups and officials protecting their own came to the surface.

Jackie Johnson, a former colleague of Gregory McMichael who was the first prosecutor on the case, is now awaiting trial on charges that she abused her position of power to shield him from prosecution.

Mr Merritt believes that Brunswick is a “microcosm” of other Georgia communities which is why it is crucial to “get relevance beyond the outcome of the case itself”.

Such relevance includes the state repealing the citizen’s arrest law which was the crux of the defence at the state trial and Georgia introducing a hate crimes law for the first time.

“For each season of my career, there’s a case that stands out. Right now that’s Ahmaud Arbery,” says Mr Merritt.

“It’s a case where I’m very proud of the work we’ve been able to do but where I’m also very concerned about what the case has revealed for citizens in south Georgia in terms of concerns with prosecutors there and an active coverup with people in the region.

“In a lot of ways this case marks a major turning point for the country.”

Mr Merritt also worked as co-counsel for the family of George Floyd, whose Memorial Day 2020 murder undeniably marked the biggest turning point in the nation’s current racial justice movement.

In that case, he worked on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and worked closely with the local AG in Hennepin County.

These two cases have led to a “shift in the national focus”, however they are “just two examples of cases I hear day after day after day”, says Mr Merritt.

“In the civil rights community we always think the case we’re working on will be the one that wakes the nation up,” he says.

“For some people Rodney King was the last straw. I graduated college the year Trayvon Martin’s killer was acquitted and that was the last straw for a lot of people. For others, George Floyd is now the last straw.

“But it’s the last straw and then everything stays the same after.”

Which is why he says it is important to maximise on the national attention of the moment and use it to push for systemic change.

“When there’s a shift in the national focus, it gives us the space to accomplish more systemic change, push things forward, have conversations about the legislature and get accountability.

“That’s part of my motivation for running for office to drive this systemic change beyond just one case.”

For Mr Merritt, while Arbery’s and Floyd’s names may be the loudest rallying cries of today for racial justice and the cases of his career which have garnered the most public attention, it was the case of a 15-year-old Black boy that had one of the biggest impacts on him personally.

Lee Merritt became close to the family of 15-year-old Jordan Edwards, who was shot and killed by a Texas police officer in 2017 (EPA)

High school freshman Jordan Edwards was in a car with his brother and friends leaving a house party in Texas back in 2017.

Police officers had been called to a report of underage drinking at the house when they heard what they believed to be gunshots outside.

Balch Springs officer Roy Oliver opened fire into the car, striking Jordan in the head, killing him instantly.

The officer claimed that he believed the car was being driven toward his partner at the time.

Body camera footage revealed it was actually driving away from the officers. Jordan was unarmed.

In 2018, Oliver was convicted of Jordan’s murder.

“That case was different - it was one of my first high-profile cases and my second wrongful death case and it was deeply and emotionally draining,” says Mr Merritt.

“Jordan was a straight-A student and his family reminded me of my own. His dad Odell and I both had the same number of kids, we were both basketball fans and we spent a lot of time together.

“I didn’t realise at the time how much it impacted me emotionally but I now realise I went into depression after Jordan was killed. I can see that now.”

Mr Merritt says he continues to develop close connections with the families he works with but, after Jordan’s case, he has learned to pay attention to his own mental health at the same time.

“I’m now in therapy,” he says.

“That’s when I paid attention to both my mental health and to the mental health of the families as many of them are in mental health crises.

“And many of the people who have been killed by police were in mental health crises.”

That’s partly why mental health will be a key focus if he becomes Texas AG, so that people struggling with mental illness can be rerouted to get the help they need rather than being trapped in the criminal justice system.

“Right now if someone is in a mental health crisis in Texas they get a police officer responding and they are dragged through the courts when they need rerouting to a mental health facility,” says Mr Merritt.

Providing other avenues out of the courts for people struggling with mental illness is all part of tackling the issues of racial violence, police brutality and mass incarceration too, Mr Merritt explains.

“The governor has spoken about the spike in mental health calls but no one is mentioning the spike in officer-involved shootings that come as a result,” he says.

Texas AG Ken Paxton speaking at Donald Trump’s 6 January rally (Copyright 2020 Jacquelyn Martin. All rights reserved.)

Research shows Black Americans are three times more likely to be killed in a police encounter than white Americans.

Someone suffering from an untreated mental illness is 16 times more likely to be killed.

Meanwhile, the US prison population has boomed by around 500 percent in the last four decades with Texas having the most prisoners of any state, despite not being the most populated.

As AG, Mr Merritt says that he would work with prosecutors in Texas to develop programmes to help tackle crimes of poverty and mental health-related incidents.

He explains that several progressive prosecutors across the country are already rerouting people committing certain crimes toward mental health resources instead of incarcerating them and, as a result, are helping to reduce rates of reoffending.

Through his non-profit Grassroots Law Project, Mr Merritt and his cofounder and Morehouse College friend Shaun King have been helping get progressive prosecutors elected so that they can introduce such changes.

“We can come up with some alternative forms of law enforcement and identify patterns and communities in distress,” he says.

“The role of the AG is to work with prosecutors to enforce the law and coordinate with them on resources for doing that. I plan to expand the role of the AG in doing that.”

It’s a marked difference from the approach taken by current AG Mr Paxton who Mr Merritt says is “misusing his office to act as the state’s top cop”.

Mr Paxton and his wife took to the stage at Mr Trump’s rally on 6 January 2020, before the former president’s supporters marched to the Capitol and stormed the building in a deadly riot.

He also sued four states because Mr Trump lost there. The suit was thrown out by the Supreme Court.

In December, the all-Republican Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stripped him of his powers to wage election cases after he pursued criminal charges against a number of election workers.

The state’s top lawyer is also facing charges of his own after he was indicted in 2015 for felony securities fraud and is under a separate investigation by the FBI for allegedly abusing his office to help a wealthy donor. He denies the allegations.

“He embodies the assault on civil liberties by right-wing extremists,” says Mr Merritt.

“He’s part of the Trump culture that has manifested in the violent insurrection on January 6 and of the people who are willing to set the constitution aside and invalidate the outcome of a free and fair election in the name of power.

“I don’t think his thinking and the thinking that he stands for reflects Texans.”

It was no coincidence that Mr Merritt announced his run on the same day that Texas Democrats fled the state in order to block the passage of a restrictive voting bill that critics say especially suppresses Black voters.

His first move in office will be to stop the “frivolous” voter lawsuits Mr Paxton has been pursuing and put an end to the “harassment of the voting community”.

“Texas is one of the most difficult states in the country to vote in,” he says.

“It should be bipartisan that people in Texas should be able to vote. I will work with the legislature to help make voting more accessible.”

As well as protecting voting rights, Mr Merritt also plans to backpedal the state’s suppression of women’s reproductive rights through its abortion bill and its infringing on the rights  of African-American and Hispanic communities through policing and redistricting.

It’s a combination of issues that Mr Merritt says “all needs to be urgently remedied”.

“Texas of all states needs to get back on track with the national constitution and basic standards for American citizens,” he says.

Lee Merritt comforts Wanda Cooper-Jones, mother of Ahmaud Arbery, as she reacts while seeing photos of her son shown at his killers’ state trial (REUTERS)

Which is why he plans to run the office of Texas’ top lawyer protecting the rights of all Texans the same way he runs the office of his own law firm fighting for people whose civil rights have been violated.

“The AG is supposed to be the people’s lawyer, the state’s top citizen’s attorney,” he says.

“And in my role [as a civil rights attorney] I make sure citizen’s rights are protected. That’s why I’ve been called the people’s lawyer.

“I always have one foot in the courtroom and one foot in the street.”

Mr Merritt feels his work in getting justice in several high-profile civil rights cases has helped him earn the trust of the people of Texas.

“I believe I’ve built a trusting relationship with the community and they know that I will advocate for them,” he says.

“People can see on high-profile cases like Ahmaud Arbery, like George Floyd, like Jordan Edwards that despite the odds and when people think we can’t win, we do.

“People can believe that. They know that’s what we do. When we show up, we make demands and we deliver on our promises.”