Kyle Rittenhouse Found Not Guilty On All Counts
Court provided images
Kyle Rittenhouse has been found not guilty on all five counts he faced for the shooting of three people.
Washington Post:
The jury weighing Kyle Rittenhouse’s fate acquitted Rittenhouse on all counts after deliberating for nearly three and a half days.
Jurors in the polarizing case said they had voted to acquit Rittenhouse, 18, of homicide, attempted homicide and other charges related to the August 2020 shootings in Kenosha, Wis.
Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, and injured Gaige Grosskreutz, who was 26 at the time. Rittenhouse testified that he fired in self-defense and pleaded not guilty to all counts.
Our own Em Carpenter had this prediction and her reasoning why, which turned out accurate:
TL;DR: I think Kyle Rittenhouse walks.
But what about the gun charge, Em?
I don’t think the law supports it, for reasons I have outlined before in Wednesday Writs: Kyle Rittenhouse Edition.
Wow Em, so you think it’s ok that he came to that protest with a gun?
I think a 17 year old kid had no business being there at all, armed or not, and his mother is derelict in her parental responsibilities for allowing — nay, facilitating — his presence that night. I don’t care how “civic minded” my kid may be, or how badly he wants to patrol the streets of Kenosha to defend dumpsters and car dealerships. If he’s not 18, he’s not going there on my watch. But he did not break the law merely by being at a protest. Whether Kyle Rittenhouse broke the law by having the gun there, I don’t think so, but even if he did it does not mean Kyle Rittenhouse is guilty of the other charges.
Em, are you a supporter of armed right-wing vigilantes?
I am not. I am a supporter of examining the facts without considering the political leanings of those involved.
Right on, Em! Those guys were scumbags anyway and they deserved it.
Completely irrelevant.
Anything else?
Yes. That judge sucks. He has acted in a manner suggesting bias, no matter my opinion of the case. He has been excessively hostile toward the prosecution, even in light of the crappy job they are doing. I have disagreed with some of his rulings, but I have not seen one that I think would be overturned in an interlocutory appeal, and most of his behavior has been outside the presence of the jury. Unfortunately, he is not acting in a manner atypical for his position.
The law may be correct, but justice is nowhere near served. Expect more armed white men to attack more social justice protests with believed impunity.Report
With any luck, the stores that get burned tonight will be burned without additional incident.Report
If history holds, it will be white anarchists and/or ultra right wing agitators who will do the burning. One hopes the police will actually arrest them this time.Report
I hope they also get prosecuted.Report
How many of the arrestees from last year have been?Report
You know, that’s a great question!
I know that a number of them were *ARRESTED*, but I don’t know how many had charges drawn up. Of those who had charges drawn up, I don’t know how many plead to a deal. Of those remaining, I don’t know how many went to trial.
I wish that there were a clearing house where we could look this stuff up (even anonymized, you know, for privacy purposes) but if there is one, I don’t know where it is.
I can only find news articles talking about how many people were arrested.Report
That sort of proves my point. Even the local Wisconsin outlets aren’t reporting charging or trials or please or convictions.
What conclusion do you draw from that?Report
That the media is inept and reports stuff like “his mom drove him there!” and doesn’t care about truth but about pushing narratives… and stories about how many (or how few) rioters are being tried for looting/rioting/vandalism will not push the narrative and, therefore, are not publicized the way the Rittenhouse trial did, does, and will.Report
The media isn’t inept, it knows exactly what it is doing. Calling it inept providing cover for it’s duplicity.Report
Are you still clinging to that myth about a “Boogaloo Boi” burning the police building in Minneapolis? That wasn’t true, and I believe that I’ve set you straight on this point before. Four people pled guilty to that: Davon De-Andre Turner, Branden Michael Wolfe, Bryce Michael Williams, Dylan Shakespeare Robinson. I couldn’t find any solid information on their ideological affiliations, but Wolfe and Robinson are white and Turner and Williams are black.
The myth that a right-winger had started the fire appears to come from a Grauniad article which misleadingly insinuated that Ivan Harrison Hunter, a self-identified “Boogaloo Boi,” had been charged with burning the precinct, but he had in fact been charged with firing shots at the already-burning precinct building.Report
How many buildings do you have to burn down before it’s not a “protest” any more?Report
Here’s my understanding of the facts:
First, Rittenhouse and the decedents were present at a riot, not a protest. There had been a peaceful protest in Kenosha on that day, but this was not it. This was a riot whose participants were engaging in malicious destruction of property. In the video, you can see and hear people wailing on cars.
Furthermore, Rittenhouse did not fire blindly into the crowd. He did not even shoot in defense of property. Rather, he ran towards a fire with a fire extinguisher, which enraged the arsonists. Ziminski told Rosenbaum to catch and kill Rittenhouse, at which point Rosenbaum gave chase and Rittenhouse fled. While chasing Rittenhouse, Rosenbaum threw an object at him and Ziminski fired the first shot, causing Rittenhouse to stop and turn around. Rosenbaum then went for the gun, at which point Rittenhouse shot him.
Do you disagree with any of these facts, or do you agree with all of them and still believe that this verdict was unjust? If the latter, why?Report
From Em, ever insightful:
Report
Once the judge tossed the weapons charges this became inevitable.Report
Makes you wonder why the prosecution didn’t dispute the length of the gun.Report
This raises the question though of why it is not surprising. I agree with Em that it is not surprising but I think we have very different reasons for finding it not surprising and I am not sure her reasoning is correct based on her posts.
I don’t think this was necessarily an unsurprising decision based on a neutral reading of the law and proving conviction of beyond a reasonable doubt. I think this was a matter of contradictory laws in problematic ways (self-defense laws do not go well with open carry) and a system designed to protect men like Rittenhouse along with a biased judge and possibly jury.
Institutionalists have a hard time admitting that institutions can be imperfect or fail.Report
Institutionalists have a hard time admitting that institutions can be imperfect or fail.
You should see intentionalists!Report
Self-defense laws do not go well with open carry? Open carry laws only make sense if the right to self-defense is recognized. I’m not even sure you can construct a scenario where this verdict would be objectionable to the left other than Rittenhouse being white.Report
Not sure if I qualify but I don’t think open carry laws go well with people intentionally putting themselves in harm’s way, which is really what happened here. This violated every responsible gun owner rule in the book, even if it was lawful.
Now unlike Saul and others I’m not ready to throw out centuries of well established self-defense law over a pretty freakish incident but I’m not happy with the outcome, and I definitely don’t like it as a gun owner. If there was ever an episode that the anti-gun crowd was going to use to justify restrictions it’s this. I see no problem drawing a line between having a weapon to protect yourself and going out of your way to arm up and join the insanity.Report
as a liberal gun owner, I agree.Report
I didn’t say there was anything bad about self-defense. I am not asking people to just accept violence upon them but stand your ground laws are often a real perversion of self-defense that it becomes tragi-comically easy for people to do anything but attempt to flee or deescalate a situation. Some states (especially in the Northeast) have or had duties to retreat.Report
Trayvon Martin agrees with you. Or he would if he were still alive.Report
Wisconsin does have a duty to retreat.
Video shows Rittenhouse was attempting to flee.Report
The irony is how people are upset about the wrong thing. I’m not upset Rittenhouse walked, I’m upset that the advantages he enjoyed that allowed him to be acquitted were not advantages other people get to enjoy.
The state should really have to work at convicting a person of a crime, it should never be an assumed win.Report
And this on the heals of the exoneration of two of the convicted killers of Malcolm X . . . decades later. But remind me again why structural racism isn’t a thing?Report
Because it’s not a thing.Report
I notice that you are avoiding mentioning Bill Cosby in your bringing up of the murder of Malcom X.
Why?Report
Intersectionality obvi. The whole point of criticizing ‘systematic’ isms is to eliminate systems so we can pick outcomes based on our feelings, whatever they may be at any given time.Report
Intersectionalists have a hard time admitting that intersectionality can be imperfect or fail.Report
Lack of relevance?Report
Well last I checked Bill Cosby had nothing to do with Malcolm X’s murder, or the wrongful convictions of two people in that murder. And best I can tell Cosby wasn’t any more wrongly convicted then Harvey Weinstein . . . .Report
What are you even talking about? Everyone involved in this was white.
Or is this one of those things where bird poops on car and it’s a vestige of white supremacy?Report
I expect better of all of you, but since everyone appears to want to be lazy about this . . .
Clean cut white boys carrying firearms at a riot don’t generally get wrongly convicted. Nor do they spend 5 plus decades dealing with said convictions, or die still wrongly convicted.
Clean cut white boys don’t have the FBI intentionally withhold exculpatory evidence. And in this case clean cut white boys didn’t rate the prosecution’s A team.
Now, is that clear enough?Report
Yeah, why can’t the riots just be allowed to happen without interference?Report
I see no insight in comparing this to some unfalsifiable hypothetical.Report
The Malcolm X convictions being over turned because the FBI withheld evidence is no hypothetical
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/exonerations-men-convicted-malcolm-xs-1965-death-81249311Report
Are there reports that the prosecution withheld evidence in this case?Report
You really don’t want to grapple with the meta here, do you?
Rittenhouse got all sorts of positive outcomes because of both his race and gender. Prosecutors may not have tanked the case intentionally, but they didn’t withhold exculpatory evidence either. Rittenhouse got a fully functioning criminal law system because the system is designed to work for white men. The two men exonerated yesterday in the Malcolm X slaying had to wait 53 years for the system to function for them in anything close to the same way. One of them died waiting for the system to function for them in the same way.
That’s a systemic problem, not an individual actor problem.Report
Oh, I agree that there is a serious systemic problem!
(And, yes, there were reports that the prosecution withheld evidence.)
I think that the serious systemic problem seriously needs to be addressed! Seriously!!!!!!!
It’s just that I’m not sure that a system where Kyle gets thrown in jail too would be that system.
But if you want to go meta, I’d say that this goes back to the need for reform in law enforcement. I have some essays about that handy if you’d like to look at them.Report
I mean, that’s bad, and I’m glad it has been addressed (to the obviously limited extent it can be post hoc), but how is it related? If you’re saying it’s an outrage the the government railroaded these people I am with you. If you’re saying you’re outraged by the government not railroading some other person or people then I am not, and am comfortable saying it is a train I will never board.Report
I’m saying that a system that railroads people of a certain color over and over and over is, itself, a major problem. I’m saying a system that’s designed to ONLY function for a certain combination of skin pigment and gender is a problem. And I’m saying IGNORING the disparate outcomes of that system you agree with what that system delivered today today is a grave moral error.Report
But there is nothing in this story to indicate systemic racism! You can assert it all you want, but there are no specifics that you can point to that support your position. That’s got to count at some point.Report
Agreed. It seems pretty fished up to me that any set of the left says “it’s racist that some white idiot today isn’t being abused the way some black guys were in the past by the state.”Report
Well since that’s not what I’m saying at all . . .Report
Structural racism is a thing, it’s just not everything (i.e. that fact that structural racism exists in the criminal justice system does not necessarily mean it exists in some other, unrelated system).
For another example of the system cutting breaks, Google Christopher Belter.Report
A lot of people I’d normally respect have acted like utter clowns on the Rittenhouse case.
Which kind of reinforces why the “due process” thing is important. Its not just to protect you from bad actors, but also against generally good people not acting their best.Report
Well, this puts me in a bind.
I accept Em’s reasoning about the outcome. I endorse her further statements, as quoted in the OP.
AND, I do not wish this to make me seem to endorse all the idiot comments that appear to be in support of Rittenhouse in this comment section or elsewhere.
Walking around with long guns on public streets is an act of intimidation that has no place in a democracy, or a republic based on voting. It just happens to be legal, and it should probably stay so. Legal and Rare. (I’m not sure we could ever call it Safe).
We were there for a century. Or more. How did we get here? How do we get back?Report
I don’t think open carry should remain legal. It is inherently contradictory with self-defense laws. There is nothing wrong with defending yourself from a true threat but a lot of self-defense/stand your ground laws are so loosely written that combining them with open carry becomes a recipe for a guy deciding to commit murder and then stating “The dead person starred at me with evil eyes and I became fearful of my life.”Report
See Martin, Trayvon . . . .Report
I also don’t accept her reasoning at all because it just comes from someone too deep into it to admit “well maybe what I learned in law school was wrong and the law is not neutral.” This is the kind of reflexive defense of institutions that is easy for bad-faith actors to exploit. “Well I really dislike that the Supreme Court found that the unborn have 14th Amendment rights and abortion is illegal throughout the land and so is birth control but they are the Supreme Court and the case went up the appropriate levels, and the law is the law” or “Well I really dislike that the Supreme Court threw out incorporation and reverse incorporation and stated it was perfectly acceptable for Arkansas to etablish Southern Baptist as the official state religion and forbid non-Southern Baptist Arkansans from holding government jobs but…”
This kind of reflexive institutionalism kills democracy more than it saves it.Report
I also don’t accept her reasoning at all because it just comes from someone too deep into it to admit “well maybe what I learned in law school was wrong and the law is not neutral.”
But her reasoning enabled her to predict the outcome successfully.
Her reasoning mapped to the real world as it exists.
This is important to some.Report
Who says she’s too deep in to admit the system’s problems? What gives you the right to make that accusation, and on what grounds do you make it, other than you disagree with her? This is Em we’re talking about. She’s spoken her mind on a lot of things. Is there no individual in the whole world who disagrees with you in good faith?Report
In Saul’s defense, Em is a woman.Report
The simple response is to say we don’t agree on open carry. I think that it is pretty much integral with the right to bear arms at all, and that’s integral to being an American citizen.
The more complex answer is that you seem to be so caught up in your own unhappiness with the situation, and the state of the criminal legal system (I’ve been listening in to a long discussion of it on another site today, and yeah, it’s a mess) that you don’t seem to have grasped my fundamental point, which was something has gone off the rails with the US.
I really really want to understand the motivations and systems that bring a Kyle Rittenhouse to such a place. Understanding is not the same as endorsement. I want to understand them so that I can have some ability to change them, to redirect them.
Most of the simple ways of “resisting” this trend, such as whacking Kyle on the head with a skateboard, end up reinforcing the trend, not mitigating it. And I don’t think that dynamic is lost on the people who advocate and/or orchestrate this kind of thing. It’s meant to be provocative, with the calculation that provocation will break in their favor. So, I think we need to get smarter about this. I don’t have an answer, I’m just sure that what did happen isn’t a good one.Report
Except that open carry is not really an integral with the right to bear arms and the current interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is really new. The old hoary examples is that in the old West, you needed to check in your guns before heading to the saloon in town. It was not like the movies.
The current situation creates invitations for murder because the law seems to be so crafted that at least some people can state “I reasonably feared for my life” in absurd situations and get away with cold-blooded murder.
I agree with you that something has gone off the rails in the United States and does not seem to be getting back on anytime soon. Some of it is the extreme asymmetrical polarization going on. I can’t for the life of me think of who or what the Democratic equivalent to someone like Gaetz, Boebert, MTG, or Gossar would be. Democrats generally want to pass policies and get involved in endless debate over whether something is a good policy or not. Republicans meanwhile have largely seem to embracing owing the libs as their only ethos. Then there is the kind of liberal that is so broad-minded he or she can’t bring him or herself out to criticize bad-faith trolls. Or even take their own side in an argument.Report
Republican politicians have created a wave of racial and economic grievance driven by propaganda created fear. They are now trying to ride that wave to permanent minority rule but white conservative males. Owning the libs is just another tactic toward that end.Report
I was a lad in gun country in rural NW Iowa. Almost every house had at least a rifle and shotgun. There was no open carry. Long guns could be transported, but had to be unloaded and in an appropriate fully enclosed hard or soft case — none of that scabbard or gun rack sh*t.
I had been hunting with a group of adults including my uncle the Green Beret colonel once when the other people in the car didn’t unload or put the shotguns back in the cases. “You’re going to drive around with loaded shotguns up here with the people? Stop the car, the kid and I will walk back to town.”
So at least in some parts of the country, within my lifetime.Report
The current situation creates invitations for murder because the law seems to be so crafted that at least some people can state “I reasonably feared for my life” in absurd situations and get away with cold-blooded murder.
Well, you know, it works for cops…Report
And it shouldn’t work for them either 99.98 percent of the time but this is not a liberation for murder from cops. If anything, I’d bet money Rittenhouse would be in jail today if he accidentally or intentionally murdered a cop, firefighter, or EMT. His mom would be in prison as well.
All this decision is going to do is have more killings with impunity and a political bent but only right-wing on left violence.Report
I issue to you the same challenge I issued to Philip here. If you think that ther this verdict was in any way unjust, then explain why, with reference to concrete, verifiable (or at least tenable in light of the available evidence) facts.
Right now you’re just incoherently railing about how the system is vulnerable to bad-faith actors without presenting a single argument for why this case is an example of that. It’s time to put up or shut up.Report
How did we get here?
I blame the abstinence of law enforcement during a riot.
The creation of a chaotic neutral zone where outlaws were allowed to run rampant resulted in a chaotic neutral zone where this happened.
Asking “how could something like this happen in a riot?” is to ignore what riots are.
You don’t want shit like this? Don’t allow riots.
You want shit like this? Allow riots.
But what if you want riots but you don’t want shit like this?
Well, I don’t know what to tell ya.Report
“not allow riots”.Report
I think you are being overly simplistic. I mean, there has been a lot of trouble with looting during a protest precisely because all the police are assigned to the area of the protest, so the looters have a heyday somewhere else.
This is a thing. It happened, for instance, during protests of the Rodney King beating. Where are you going to allocate resources to best protect the public? This is not as simple a question as you make it out to be.Report
Let’s say that the government cannot properly allocate resources to best protect the public.
Let’s take that as a given.
Now what?
My answer: well, you’re inevitably going to end up with shit like Rittenhouse.
I see this as a failure of government.
You see it as a failure of Rittenhouse.
And here we are.Report
It might help if the media would stop inciting riots through profoundly incompetent or dishonest reporting on these issues. I don’t know. Maybe even if they were doing better, social media would still have spread the same misinformation. But they certainly weren’t helping.Report
Seems like this was the right legal outcome.
It feels naive to say race wasn’t a factor in all this, even if the main players were white and even if the outcome was right.
If white privilege contributed to this outcome (and I think it did) we address that not by sending Rittenhouse to jail but to assume Black and Brown defendants get the same treatment he did.
The issue is less that Rittenhouse walked and more that Tamir Rice or Filipe Castille never even got a day in court for lesser actions.Report
Entirely unsurprised that Rambo Jesus got off. He’s still an idiot and shouldn’t have been there.Report
I really want to know why the prosecution has never gone after his mom for taking him.Report
Probably because she didn’t.
Does that matter, though?Report
It explains why they didn’t go after her. In my books he remains legally innocent and morally culpable for the how fishing mess.Report
I don’t blame him for the riots, myself.Report
Neither do I. Culpability for that lies primarily on the fishwits and vermin who came skittering out to take advantage of the suspension in law enforcement caused by the BLM protests and the police’s sadly typical response to said protests.
But if you don’t start a building on fire you’re definitely still culpable if you run your idiot self into said burning building and get some people killed.Report
How about if you’re trying to put the fire out and the arsonist attacks you and you shoot him?Report
Rambo Jesus is not a cop, in the national guard, a firefighter nor, and most importantly, a resident of Kenosha. He should not have been there. Full stop.
He’s legally innocent of murdering the people he shot (and had the bullets flown the other way one of them would have been legally innocent of murdering him) but he’s morally culpable for putting his idiot self in that situation and there’s flat out no justification for it.Report
AgreedReport
This is one of those places where the media did a poor job.
Kenosha is 3 miles away from the state boarder. Kyle’s dad lived and worked in Kenosha. Kyle worked there as a lifeguard. His sister’s boyfriend lived there and Kyle stored his rifle at his place. Kyle lived within shopping distance.
He was effectively a local resident.Report
And here’s the handwaving again. Rambo Jesus didn’t live IN Kenosha. His home was not engulfed in the violence that exploded there. He didn’t find himself in a community experiencing a riot- he put himself there intentionally, purposefully and knowingly. It’s astonishing the contortions right wingers will go in this area to suddenly “well you have to understand” away the idea of personal responsibility- and for what? The idiot isn’t going to jail- he just can’t be in any way plausibly held up as a hero or martyr.Report
I suppose it does, but that means a whole lot of news outlets on both side of the aisle need to issue retractions.Report
Do you think all of the other information you’ve received on the trial telling you how unfair it was was good information?
Are you thinking “hey, maybe I was fed bad information and part of my reaction is due to the bad information I was fed”?Report
I haven’t received any information telling me his trail was unfair.
Which has been my whole damn point. He got a lot of benefit out of being who he was. He got a lot of benefit out of contradictory laws that were designed to punt on stuff like this for white people. He got a “fair” trial in as much as the system is designed to give him a “fair” trial.
The difference with his mom is a lot of reporting said she drove him. That’s bad information, not a “fair” or “unfair” system.Report
You’ve received at least one piece of bad information:
“His mom drove him there”
That ended up not being true.
What other not true things are informing you right now?Report
You tell me. The reporting of the trial seems spot on.Report
Was it illegal for Kyle to have the gun?
This seems to be a question that even the prosecution agreed on during the trial.
What’s your answer? Is it different from the prosecution’s?Report
Well, he said she didn’t drive him. Are we sure that’s true?Report
Well, I’ve given you my evidence that she didn’t.
What is your evidence that she did?Report
What crime in particular to you think she committed?Report
He shouldn’t have been there because it was dangerous for him to go. The decedents shouldn’t have been there because they were there specifically for the purpose of engaging in wanton and malicious destruction of a minority-owned business.
Let’s be clear about this: Rittenhouse was attacked for trying to put out a fire. Ziminski told Rosenbaum to catch him and kill him, and then fired the first shot.
Rittenhouse may have been kind of a dumbass, as 17-year-olds often are, but the rioters are the villains here. There’s no moral equivalence.Report
I never claimed moral equivalence. The looting idiots shouldn’t have been looting or causing havoc while using the BLM protests as a shield for them to have their luls. If they were alive I’d be all for them standing trial but, ya know, they’re dead.Report
Tamir Rice was, yet again, unavailable for comment.Report
Leonard Peltier is still locked up as well.Report
HEY LOOK OVER THERE!Report
Where is Tamir Rice incarcerated these days? I seem to have missed his trial.Report
You have to understand. The kid had a gun.
A GUN, you understand?
Well, a toy gun, but still.Report
Goodness! Were the cops ever charged with misconduct?
No, they were not.
Ah, well. The Justice System is what the Justice System is, I guess.Report
This is obviously meant as a response to something somebody said, but it seems to have been mis-threaded.Report
Complaining about why Tamir Rice was not tried seems to misapprehend why prosecutors failed to charge him.
It’s because the cops shot him the second they pulled up in their car.
Tamir Rice was dead. You’re a lawyer, are there usually trials for people the police shoot dead? I mean, I could see there being a hearing or something, maybe.
You know, to cover whether the cops did anything wrong.Report
Reading comprehension problem again? Of course Tamir Rice wasn’t tried. Because he was dead. That was the damn point.Report
That’s not a problem with the justice system, though.
That’s a reason that Law Enforcement needs to be reformed.
(The fact that the justice system said that the cops didn’t do anything wrong is a problem with the justice system. Oh, golly does it need to be reformed!)Report
This is obviously meant as a response to something somebody said, but it seems to have been mis-threadedReport
Should I read this with tongue in cheek like when you said that you missed Tamir Rice’s trial?Report
Chip, are you *SERIOUSLY* complaining about someone using “hey look over there” tactics in a response to your Tamir Rice comment?Report
Forget it Chip, it is JayJay townReport
Rice was an example of how the system is NOT supposed to work.
To be fair, normally the system does NOT work that way.Report
Tamir Rice.
Trayvon Martin.
Eric Garner.
George Floyd.
Breonna Taylor.
Muhammad Aziz and the late Khalil Islam
And so many many more. All received outcomes that were based on the system working as it was designed. So the fact that Kyle Rittenhouse also received an outcome that was as the system was designed is not shocking.
One would hope its clear that the outrage is not aimed at Rittenhouse’s outcome but all those others.Report
I’d be down with reforming law enforcement and the justice system, myself.
I suggest something other than “defund!”, though.Report
“One would hope its clear that the outrage is not aimed at Rittenhouse’s outcome but all those others.”
And yet you chose this moment to complain.Report
no – we’ve been complaining for years. Its what the protests in Kenosha were all about.Report
But here, on this thread, a story where the facts of the case had nothing to do with race, you and Chip have kept bringing up race. It says nothing about Rittenhouse but says a lot about you. Until you explain specifics about what race has to do with this, you’re the uncle at Thanksgiving who keeps bringing up race. You don’t realize you are; you probably think you’re the heroic one confronting him. But everything on this little indentation from where Chip brought up a separate story about a black person has been because you guys won’t look at anything without seeing race. The fact that you feel the need to distract from the topic of a white person by bringing up a black person – on the basis of the white person’s and the black person’s races – puts you in the wrong.Report
You are looking at the trees. We are looking at the forest.Report
I am looking at facts. You are looking at skin color. You sound like the uncle who won’t stop talking about race and doesn’t care about facts.Report
The facts of this case are that Kyle Rittenhouse received a verdict the system is primed to deliver for him in no small measure because of his gender and race. A person of either differing gender or differing race or both would not likely have received the same verdict.
And given the circumstances that precipitated the demonstrations turned riots that led him to be in Kenosha, those facts are very pertinent to the verdict he was given by a system primed to hand him that verdict.Report
No, no, no! You cannot assert that without any facts! I mean, just the fact that you’re putting in the word “gender” shows a lack of support for your argument, given that men have a much harder time in the judicial system.Report
Rice won a negative lottery ticket. The system isn’t supposed to do that and largely doesn’t. A combo of firing incompetent cops + operators would work wonders here so we’re in police reform territory.
Martin’s killer wasn’t part of the system and when he died his killer claimed self defense, not stand your ground.
Floyd’s killer was convicted of murder.
Garner’s health was so poor he couldn’t survive a violent arrest and he insisted on a violent arrest because he was looking at life in prison.
Breonna Taylor’s killers should have been fired and probably charged with murder. We’re in police reform territory again here.
Aziz and Islam are from 1965. System was racist then and it’s changed a lot.
Those last two prove your point of “the system working as designed”, but if you’re going to point to 50+ year old history and claim nothing has changed then you’re dealing with rhetoric and not reality.Report
I’m trying, and failing, to think of examples where young black men have shot people and successfully claimed self defense.
As opposed to young black men being killed because “he had a gun”.
The fact is, the system Phillip is referring to is the court of public opinion which almost never sees a young black man with a gun as innocent.
Tamir Rice, Philando Castille and numerous others are not anomalies, they are the norm.Report
This seems to be a great opportunity to call for more equity in the ability to claim self-defense.
Cory Maye is a minor victory in this fight.
There will be others in the future.
In the meantime, the whole “affirmative defense” thing will need more supporters. We’re going to need your help in the future to bring equity around.Report
Are you following local crime blotter? Just saying your average justified shoot is not going to end up on CNN, or necessarily even reported at all.Report
No crimes charged in this case. The Mayor and DA disagree about this, appparently.Report
If we exclude the police, I can’t think of this happening successfully. I can think of a few times in Detroit where it was tried and failed.
High profile self defense claims are extremely rare.Report
I’m trying, and failing, to think of examples where young black men have shot people and successfully claimed self defense.
This is the problem with an anecdote-driven worldview. Your understanding of the world is driven entirely by a handful of nonrepresentative cases cherry-picked by the national news media to drive a particular narrative. They’re playing you like a violin.
I’m having trouble getting the raw data from the FBI, but here’s a report from the VPC, which I believe is biased far enough to the left that you’ll trust it. Interestingly, the number of justifiable homicides committed by black shooters is roughly equal to the number of justifiable homicides committed by white shooters.
Black people successfully make self-defense claims in homicide cases just as often as white people, and you had no idea. Stop trusting the news media and/or social media to give you a representative view of the world. That’s not what they do.Report
A couple clarifications on the above.
1. In FBI data, “Latino” is not a race. Unless they’re black or Asian, Latinos are classified as white. So “white” above refers to the vast majority of Hispanic Americans in addition to non-Hispanic whites, i.e. about 70% of the population. I use this convention throughout this comment and the parent comment.
2. Roughly equal numbers of homicides are committed by black and white offenders, so conditional on having fatally shot someone, a black person is about as likely to mount a successful self-defense case as a white person.
3. Nothing in this comment or the parent is adjusted for the relative sizes of these groups, so while someone whose shooting is ruled justifiable is equally likely to be black or white, a randomly selected black person is 5-6x as likely as a random white person to have had a fatal shooting he performed ruled justifiable.Report
The trouble with a quick internet research as you are doing is that you can find any snippet of data that appears to confirm what you want.
For example, in your very own link,, if you scroll down, you find that in the table where the race of the shooter and victim are sorted out, you find that the overwhelming percentage of “justified” shootings by black people is when they shoot other black people.
The police have a slang term for this, and you can Google it.
In the 5 year period, there were only 46 shootings by black people of white people that were justified.
Now, I’ll grant, this is a lot more than I expected. So that’s good!
But how many times did a black person shoot a white person, and have their claim of self defense overruled?
Well, that data wasn’t in the report. And in any case, there really isn’t going to be that data, because the decision by a shooter to claim self defense is very much a self-fulfilling one where only people who already have an expectation of fair play by the justice system, or have overwhelming evidence in their favor, use the claim.
The primary claim you’re making, that a black person can carry a gun (like Rittenhouse) and be assumed by police to be a peaceful citizen (like they did with Rittenhouse), and then if he shoots a white person, to have an expectation of being exonerated, just doesn’t square with other facts.
Like, the number of times we have heard police justify shooting because the victim had a gun (a claim made sometimes right here on this blog).
And of course, the much larger claim, that black people don’t have the structure of law and bigotry stacked against them, is even more risible.Report
And of course, the much larger claim, that black people don’t have the structure of law and bigotry stacked against them, is even more risible.
They do!
But you should see how people react when you suggest stuff like “here, read this study on how there’s more police violence in districts with police unions than districts without”.Report
The Venn diagram of people who want to reform police and those who demand we “not allow riots” is a disjoint set.Report
That would probably be a better point if you were speaking to someone who were not in one of those sets.
You might be surprised at who is in the union of “I will argue against police reform” and “Well, you have to understand about riots…”, though.Report
BLM is not served by riots. For that matter I don’t see how the left is served by riots.
I don’t see why opposing the riots makes you a creature of the right.Report
*Watches white supremacists burn down a police station.*
“Man, that makes BLM look really bad!”Report
I think it was all of the “it’s just property… they have insurance… it’s important that people be allowed to protest violence against black people” defenses given of the white supremacists given by the lefties that smeared BLM.Report
What city is that in? Your other post was nut picking a tweetReport
Which of the men shot by Rittenhouse was black?Report
They were politically black.Report
This case, and the huge outpouring of public interest, indeed this very blog post explains why the race of those men us so important.Report
Actually, it isn’t, but a lot of people really want it to be.
The race of the defendant is interesting because he’s gotten so much support that other defendants don’t get. Otherwise the most interesting thing is the legal question over the boundaries of self defense, especially with regards to civil unrest and willfully engaging that unrest.Report
At least one of them had an n-word pass.Report
Hey, Chip.
This came out, like, *YESTERDAY*.
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As I’ve suggested before, if Rittenhouse had been the one who had ended up dead, his shooter would and should have been prosecuted, and probably, given my admittedly limited understanding of Wisconsin self-defense law, his shooter would have pretty much the same self-defense case. So Rittenhouse’s shooter might well have walked. But unless you belong to what James Comey, when he was U.S. Attorney in NYC, used to call the “chickenshit club,” you don’t shy away from the tough cases just because they’re tough in order to protect your won-lost record.
Not that the prosecution did a good job, from what I saw, but that isn’t all that unusual. Not that the judge did a good job either, from what I saw, but that, too, sadly, isn’t all that unusual.
All that said, this verdict was one that an honest jury could well have reached based on the evidence before it. Was it the verdict of an honest jury based on the evidence before it? I suspect that it was, largely because of the length of deliberation. When the fix is in, it usually works fast. But we will probably never know. Which is sad.
And, of course, internet loudmouths will see this case as proof of whatever they believed before.Report
This makes intuitive sense but the devil is in the details, and the details for of these guys are terrible.
Law says you’re supposed to try to flee.
The first guy was a lunatic with a long criminal history of violence and sex crimes. He chased down Rittenhouse who was attempting to flee. Between his earlier threats against Rittenhouse personally, his overall aggression, and his likely having started all this because of the demons in his head, he has no reasonable claim to self defense.
2nd guy, dead guy with the skateboard, also chased down Rittenhouse while Rittenhouse was again attempting to flee. His only claim to self defense would be claiming that he thought Rittenhouse was “an active shooter”, but the video shows that he wasn’t actively shooting. He also has no reasonable claim to self defense.
3rd guy, shot in the arm, might be able to make some kind of self defense claim but it would be a LOT harder than Rittenhouse. Once again, he’s not trying to flee, he’s the aggressor. Once again, his only potential claim is “active shooter”. Now here that’s not as laughably bad as with the first two because at that point Rittenhouse did in fact shoot people in front of him, but it’s a much harder hill to climb.
The Prosecutor will claim, probably both successfully and correctly, that this was a lynch mob. The lynch mob wasn’t trying to defend itself against a shooter, the lynch mob was trying to enact justice for one of their own getting shot.Report
Three House Republicans have troll tweeted that Rittenhouse can intern for them: https://twitter.com/zackbeauchamp/status/1461793075160928261?s=20Report
Not a bad option if his interests are in that direction (which to be fair, they seem not to be).Report
On the one hand, right wing politics and the right wing cult of celebrity could be a pretty lucrative option for Rittenhouse. On the other hand, working the right winger rubes and right wing grift generally requires no small amount of wit and Rittenhouse hasn’t displayed a lot of that. He could be the next Ben Shapiro or he could be the next Milo Yiannopoulos.Report
I’ll be shocked if anyone remembers his name without help from google in 6 months.Report
Ditto.Report
The point is not whether Rittenhouse is remembered or not. He is part of a growing trend of implied and actual violence used by right-wing forces in this country and the acquittal will only make right-wingers get more emboldend. The “it is okay to plow into protestors” laws in some states already show close to or actually explicit state sanctioning of right-wing violence against the perceived left enemy in some parts of the United States.
There is something quite disturbing to me about the “he will be forgotten in six months” yawn, it is like a proverbial ostrich sticking its head in the sand because showing alarm is deeply uncool or something.Report
Why would anyone forget about this story? A live broadcast of prosecutorial excess. Any actual civil liberties union would be decrying half a dozen things that happened. If you two want to reclaim your party for the cause of liberalism as it would have been defined in my dad’s generation, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. That’s not the only reason this story won’t be forgotten, but it’s a big one.Report
I don’t want to speak for North but I don’t think the outcome of the case was wrong on the law. I just don’t think the lionization of him is principled or particularly deep. The whole thing triggers the libs and once the libs have been sufficiently triggered by this episode the focus will be on whatever the next thing is that triggers the libs.Report
If I were a liberal (and in the old sense, I am), and I believed that there are a lot of voters who think the race essentialism and rioting has been bad for the country, I’d be talking about this case non-stop. I’d do everything I could to make this the high-water mark. I’d be going after the press (yes, I’m saying you should be going after the press) for its falsehoods and for its support of the radical leftist ideology. I can’t get Joy Reid off the air, but maybe you can, and if you think the world would be better if she were off the air, then go for it.
So don’t praise Rittenhouse. Talk about riots and an elite who think white-on-white violence is somehow white supremacist. The people who are ruining the Democratic Party will never look more foolish than they do today. Take the fight to them.
(See also: “I sure love cake, and the bakery just offered me a free giant cake, but it’s not my birthday”.)Report
I mean, I agree that these things are a problem and that the broader Democratic/center left coalition handicaps itself by keeping those people and ideas in the tent. I dissent on it when it comes up and I would not hate it at all if what just happened in Virginia causes a correction. It should be a wake-up call to the kind of liability it presents. More broadly I see it as its own form of nihilism, frankly not that different from the ‘stop the steal’ crap. A bunch of myopic, decadent, childish people who don’t get how good they have it. I’m not much of a partisan. I’m not watching Joy Reid anymore than I’m watching Tucker.
Regarding Rittenhouse I’m not going to do what others in either camp do, which is abandon obvious sense to validate my own priors. As pro 2A as I am I have no problem with prohibiting a minor from possessing a firearm when not hunting or target shooting under adult supervision. Apparently that is not the law in WI, which strikes me as dumb, but it is what it is. I am following those same principles when questioning the inclination to see racism in the grass on the ground and the stars in the sky and concluding that the solution for it is to torch a grocery store. It’s sad that I have to pick between a movement that tolerates that kind of crap and another that decided to eliminate its entire platform to elevate a 3rd rate game show host. But again, it is what it is.Report
Proud Boys call for ‘stacking up’ bodies ‘like cord wood’ after verdict
Wow, this is really a bad look for liberals. They need to really do some introspection and realize how extreme and out of touch with real America they are.Report
I feel like I’ve just been called objectively pro Proud Boy.Report
Well, if you aren’t on board with the racial aspect, you must be racist.Report
Reminded of this one:
Report
No, you’ve been called a “white moderate liberal”, the sort that MLK complained about.
This is how structural racism works, even within the minds of people who are ostensibly liberal.
We’ve explained, over and over again, that much of the arson and destruction in the protests was done not by anyone connected with BLM, but hooligans and organized white supremacists.
And yet…again and again and again, the reference is made to burning buildings and how BLM and the liberals need to apologize for them.
While at the very same time, white supremacists have murdered cops and attacked the Capitol and are calling for open insurrection and slaughter and…
Crickets.
This is how racism becomes embedded and weaponized even by people who are ostensibly liberal, that the victims of injustice are assigned guilt even for things the perpetrators do, while the perpetrators are allowed every excuse, every possible presumption of innocence.
No one here has any open racism, but that doesn’t matter.
Injustice doesn’t need our open support, just passive acquiescence.Report
And yet…again and again and again, the reference is made to burning buildings and how BLM and the liberals need to apologize for them.
It’s not that the liberals need to apologize for them.
It’s that they need to stop saying “well, it’s just property, isn’t human life the important thing?” for them.Report
I point out that a statement is factually incorrect, and you respond with something about how liberals need to stop making weak arguments.
Why?
If a liberal makes another weak argument, are you compelled to make another factually incorrect statement?
Its like an arms race of absurdity.Report
I copied and pasted your assertion before I disagreed with it, Chip.
You’re misunderstanding the dynamic. People aren’t saying that “liberals need to apologize for burning buildings”.
People are saying “quit making the ‘well, you have to understand’ speech that touches on the existence of insurance and points out that there are plenty of immigrants who want to move here who would be happy to open a bodega in the burned out shell of the building.”
Liberals aren’t being asked to apologize for the white supremacists burning stuff down.
They’re being asked to stop asking if them doing so is really as bad as the *OTHER* white supremacists are saying.Report
Once again, you are trying to connect a false statement, to something else entirely.
I’m just saying that anyone who references “BLM protests” and “burning down buildings” is making a factually false reference.
You seem to want to talk about anything other than that.Report
Not at all. I’d love to talk about it.
It’s weird how the BLM protests had so many liberals defending the idea of “it’s only property”.
Why do you think that is?
Would you agree that the “it’s only property” people were covering for white supremacy? (Would you agree that they’re likely to be white supremacists themselves?)Report
Where did I ask for an apology? On the matter of a white liberal calling another white liberal a white liberal I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that.Report
Try something like “I’m a white-passing Native American” and accuse them of erasure.Report
“no one here has any open racism”
Are you sure? There are commenters here who are upset that a white man who was not guilty of the charges was found not guilty of the charges, and they’re upset because of the color of his skin.Report
You can use my name when you talk about me. No, really, I’m ok with it.
Unfortunately you aren’t characterizing my objections correctly, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
My issue, and much of the left’s issue, is that Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted in a case that would have resulted in a black man being convicted of at least one of the many charges. We se the system functioning as it was designed, and we don’t agree with that function.Report
Team Blue is claiming any effort to prevent burning buildings is an act of white supremacists and shooting a serial lunatic is shooting a protester.
That’s the ACLU, Blue Media, and people on this board worry about protestors being shot.
Team Blue owns the burning buildings because they want to own them. Nothing stopped them from backing RittenhouseReport
Team Blue is saying that firing an AK-47 into a police station is..bad, maybe even worse than stealing candy bars from Walgreens.
Team Blue is saying that a coordinated network of white supremacists acted as agents provocateurs to incite riots in the summer of 2020.
And so Team Blue says that any attempt to smear BLM with riots while remaining silent about the white supremacist campaign to incite riots is false but easily explained by CRT.Report
RE: firing into a police station
So the riots have a moral right to exist like police stations?
This is you talking ownership of burning buildings.
Re: White supremacist campaign
I see one lunatic who can’t plan on his next rape and a lynch mob. Everyone in the mob who name we know had a criminal record for violence and was a card carrying member of the left.Report
It was a white supremacist who pled guilty to firing an AK 47 into a police station.
And if you really don’t see white supremacists inciting violence across the country you haven’t been keeping abreast of news.
What you’re doing here is enacting what progressives talk about, which is the willful blindness to the long (and continuing) bloody history of white supremacist violence.
Which itself is a way of tacitly acquiescing, of turning away and shutting the curtains.Report
You are shifting the conversation to some vague “the entire country”. We are talking about Rittenhouse and the Left taking ownership of the burning buildings that set the stage for his actions.
If you have evidence that it was White Supremacists who were burning stuff there, by all means put it on the table.
If you can’t do that then I have explained why it looks like the Left is taking ownership of the fires.
The right is happy to back him and everyone else who is putting out fires.
The left could simply not back the firebugs.Report
Do you know who set fire to those buildings?Report
I know who is claiming any effort to prevent the burning is an act of white supremacy.
That’s the part which is in the lefts control.Report
So we’ve gone from the Bailey of “BLM is responsible for burning buildings” to the nutpicking Motte of “Some guy says preventing a building from being burned is an act of white supremacy.”Report
“some guy” being the ACLU, even after the verdict, Biden before the trial, and huge amounts of the team Blue Media.
If you’re worried about this verdict encouraging protestors being shot, something we see even here, then you aren’t drawing a line between the rioters and the protestors.Report
Joe Biden said, “preventing people from burning down buildings is white supremacy”??
Why do you guys always make Biden sound like such a badass? Was he washing his Trans Am with his shirt off while he said it?Report
Before the trial, Biden called Rittenhouse a White Supremist. To be fair it’s likely he was just listening to the Blue news.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-ducks-question-on-past-rittenhouse-commentsReport
Well, a Proud Boy did. And not even that. He said that “The left wont stop until their bodied get stacked up like cord wood”, which while threatening is also as factually true as that the right won’t either. And I can’t find a link to the actual quote. So, in conclusion, this isn’t a case of nutpicking at all but a true reflection of the Republican Party.Report
IIRC, the law is broad to avoid letting some podunk cop find an excuse to jam up a young hunter on a weapons charge (small town politics are so much fun).Report
I hear you. I’m just saying that for all the tough issues with gun laws I feel like this is one we can figure out.Report
Oh, very much agree, but crafting smart policy, or even “not dumb” policy, is always a stretch for politicians.Report
The more and more I think about it, while it might not have needed to be Rittenhouse, it was going to be someone.
The entire gov’t had abdicated it responsibly. Completely and utterly. The whole job of the gov’t is to handle things like this. But, instead, no one was there. Indeed, across the country, all during the last two summers, no one was there to stop the rioting, in which over 40 buildings were burned in Kenosha alone.
People care about their communities, livelihoods, friends, and families, and when they see a complete failure of those elected to handle things such as this, indeed if they perceive those same officials causing this, the citizens can and do band together to take action.
This is specifically what the second amendment is about. It isn’t about being able to go hunting, or rise up against the government, but it is about being able to band together to protect your community. And it isn’t the first time we have seen this in recent memory. In the late seventies, the gay community of San Francisco banded together to escort LGBT folk as the number of “bashings” in that city was quite high. In New York, the Guardian Angles did essentially the same thing. We all remember Rooftop Koreans, who stepped in when, again, the government failed. BLM had a chance to do this but squandered it. And so on. This is the true meaning of Militia in that amendment, and Mr. Rittenhouse shows the need for the second part; to keep and bear arms.Report
Aaron, it’s good to see you commenting I hope you are well.
But good God. If Kyle Rittenhouse is the best argument we can make for the 2nd Amendment we’re in real trouble.Report
We have the speeches of Martin Luther King to show the beauty of the 1st amendment, but we defend Larry Flint to show the importance.
I am well, thank you.Report
Sure, and the example of MLK also shows the limitations of communities banding together and taking action to protect themselves from what they see as threats to which the legitimate authorities have abandoned them.Report
Indeed, we often only want the beauty of the law in its majesty, as opposed to the unwanted that need the protections therein.Report
Here’s a case I hadn’t heard about but now have:
I support this woman. I’m even willing to say she did the right thing.
She doesn’t belong in prison. She should be out walking around as freely as Kyle Rittenhouse.
Maybe given a medal as well.Report
This! This is the crap that should be pissing people off.Report
While I am strongly in favor of people—especially minors—killing their abusers, speaking purely in legal terms, Kizer has a much weaker self-defense case than Rittenhouse did. The killing appears to have been a) premeditated, and b) not in response to an immediate threat.
I haven’t done a deep dive on the facts here, and I could be wrong, but this is definitely not a “Rittenhouse, if he were black” case. The cases are very different, in ways that are salient to the viability of a self-defense claim.Report
Way back in the early 90’s, I took a Women’s Studies course. This was in the one of the periods where it was considered “trolling” to bring up Dworkin and MacKinnon rather than in one of the periods where it was considered offensive to call bringing up Dworkin and MacKinnon “trolling”.
Oh! We were still discussing whether Paglia was a feminist, if you want to put a pin where were.
Anyway, one of the points brought up was that, in domestic violence cases, the law was sexist. Men who killed their female housemates generally got charged with 2nd or 3rd degree murder because they weren’t intending to, you know, *KILL* their housemates. They were just beating them up again. Throwing them down the stairs. The way they’d done dozens of times before. But when *WOMEN* did it, holy cow, the hammer of the law came *DOWN*. Because of stuff like premeditation. The women did stuff like buy a big bottle of booze, wait for the guy to pass out, then shoot him until the gun was empty, reload, then empty the gun again.
“Why didn’t you go to the cops and trust the system to protect you?” was usually the argument given by the system.
Anyway, I think that affirmative defenses ought to be allowed more often.
I think that this young woman ought to be able to make her case without being told that she can’t.Report
Right, I’m drawing a distinction here between what the law is and what it should be. I could be wrong, but legally, I don’t think she has nearly as strong a defense as Rittenhouse has. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t nullify the fish out of the law if I were on the jury. Not saying I definitely would after seeing all the evidence, but that would be my inclination going in.Report
Like to think I/we would get the chance to anull, but I am not sure the jury would get that kind of info.Report
This comment is buried pretty deep, and a lot of people here need to see it, so I’m linking to it from a top-level comment. The TL;DR is that, according to the VPC (based on FBI data), in gun homicides which are ruled justifiable, the shooter is just as likely to be black as white. This idea that black people don’t get to claim self-defense, or are virtually never successful when they do, is total bunk.
Stop assuming that something doesn’t happen just because the national news media aren’t spoon-feeding examples to you.Report
If, for some reason, the whole “well, the prosecution can appeal” thing doesn’t work out, there’s always the option of a citizen defense force:
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https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1461762957478613006
When did the ACLU lose their gosh darn minds?Report
Rest of that tweet series is even better. Rittenhouse is a white supremacist. The serial pedophile was exercising first amendment rights. No mention of the burning buildings nor the riot.
We’re deep into truth-free narrative. In response to the verdict.Report
The organization that built a mythology around itself by defending Nazi’s civil rights seems awfully blase about tossing that away to be another group of left-liberal lawyers.Report
While going out of my way to procrastinate before a Sunday chore, I found this thread from August 2020 where we discussed the shooting at the time.
Lotta stuff has happened since then, of course.Report
I guess it took a little longer than I thought it would:
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also amusing was how the thing I said was the only charge they’d actually get him for ended up being dismissed!
Report
In the news: Rittenhouse expressed support for BLM and their peaceful protests.
BLM replied “I don’t f–k with you” and made it very clear they don’t distinguish between their protests and the riots that accompanied them.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/blm-disses-kyle-rittenhouse-supports-movementReport