The legal principal involved in that is called dual sovereigns, and no it’s not double jeopardy. Basically the concept 2 laws were broken, one that the state has, the other that the fed has. The state can not prosecute for the fed laws, so it’s not double jeopardy as he was not yet even charged with violating the federal law and has not stood trial for it. This applies even if the state and fed law wording is exactly the same as they are 2 different laws.
In order for it to be victim-blaming, Rittenhouse would have to have been the victim. Contrary to the judge’s assertions, it’s really easy to tell who the victims were, here. Hint: They’re the ones who ended up dead.
Oh come off it. He wouldn’t have had the rifle if he hadn’t crossed state lines, because the friend who made the illegal straw purchase for him couldn’t have done so in Illinois.
The people who are shouting, “He crossed state lines! He was just looking for trouble! Why was he there?” reminds me of people who chastise women for wearing revealing outfits in public: “Why is she wearing that? In that location? She’s just asking for trouble.”
I think the “crossed state lines” also has a bit of a stigma attached to it. I recall several times in my youth and adolescence about such-and-such driving a younger girl “across state lines for immoral purposes,” where the age of consent may be a year or two lower.
It’s one of those phrases that kinda has a lecherous, less-than-pure vibe to it.
It’s hard to credibly maintain “self-defense” when your property and person are located in an entirely different state from the events in question. A valid course of self-defense, for him, would have been simply staying in his own state.
But he chose not to stay in his own state. He spent a non-significant amount of time and money to obtain a weapon (illegally) and travel to the site of a civil disturbance. The fact that it was in an entirely different state shows that he didn’t need to do that, which shows that his stated defenses were all lies. He wanted to shoot some people, so he went looking for trouble and found it.
That’s not what self-defence is about. It doesn’t ask us how you got into a particular situation. It’s about the situation you are in, in that particular moment. Do you consider that you are at serious risk?
For example, maybe you shouldn’t have gone to that bar in a dangerous part of town, but that doesn’t deprive you of the right to self-defence if a bar fight breaks out.
Right, because wearing a short dress is exactly the same as taking a semi-automatic rifle to a tense situation and wanting to enforce the law because the police need “help”.
Wrong. In the broader ethical sense, we can absolutely ask this. It’s a different context from a criminal trial that has a different and narrower standard for self-defense.
It’s an incontrovertible fact that Rittenhouse was perfectly safe at his home in Illinois until he chose to put himself and others at danger. The legal proceedings in this case prevented the prosecution from making that observation, but there’s no reason whatsoever we must be similarly constrained in making moral judgments. He’s an asshole who wanted to shoot protesters, and he did. A law that permits this behavior is an unjust law.
If we used the rote legal definition for all moral judgments, we’d be unable to change the law, because all laws would automatically be moral. I think we all know that’s not the case.
Yes. But that in itself contains the answer to the OP question – strictly legally, in this case, the crossing of the state line does bupkis to make things “worse”. By inference and association with other cases it supports the narrative that the individual was looking for trouble but it really was not determinative.
And hey, sure, you want to make the moral argument: “A law that permits this behavior is an unjust law.” Well, at least an unwise law. But you and I are smart enough to realize that’s not going to get a “resolved, so say we all” around here.
That would also have been the case if he had gone to Kenosha from, say, Milwaukee (although the characterization of “obliterates” in either instance can be debated).
You start off by saying “well I can moralize about it”, but then the problem emerges by the end of your post–you do not just wish to moralize, you wish to advocate for changes to the law.
The law is changed so that you cannot assert self-defense if you’ve put yourself in a situation “that isn’t near your home, and that you have reasonable expectation could become dangerous.” You have now criminalized women using a personal firearm to stop a man trying to rape them when they travel from the suburbs for a night on the town in a dangerous neighborhood. Congratulations.
Yes, as everyone knows, an active civil disturbance broadcast on television is exactly the same as a sketchy part of town. A woman visiting a nightclub is exactly the same as a man who makes statements that he wishes he could shoot people. It’s so complicated that no jury could possibly tell the difference between these two scenarios.
Not my proposition to begin with, and I wouldn’t be particularly inclined to go to great lengths to defend it here, but it seems to me like it wouldn’t be insanely complicated to create a test for self-defense claims that allows for consideration of the totality of the circumstances that led to the shooting, rather than just the conditions at the precise moment of the shooting.
In other words, if you raise the defense “my life was in danger,” the jury does a sort of weighing of responsibility for how your life got in danger, and whether you acted unreasonably in bearing primary responsibility (or even acted with reckless disregard, say) for those circumstances.
If you were just minding your own business in a dangerous area, OK, not reckless of you. If you took a cross-country flight to put on pretend combat gear and walk up to two feet away from a person and screamed at them while open-carrying, OK, we’re factoring that into our consideration of your duty to retreat. We ask juries to do complicated things all the time, and there are some parallels in the law for asking a jury to tell the difference between, I dunno, me shooting a guy who drove 1,000 miles to kick in my door and get in my face about fantasy baseball, and me shooting a guy who I drove 1,000 miles to kick in his door to get in his face about fantasy baseball.
“Crossed state lines” is definitely designed to exaggerate the degree of premeditation and intentionality of what Rittenhouse did. Imagine, if instead, you could say “he travelled 1000 miles to the site of the protest to walk around with a gun and help the police restore order”
You’d think “oh yeah that guy went way out of his way to start trouble.”
But if you heard that he travelled to the next town 10 miles over, it wouldn’t sound nearly so out of his way and therefore implies less of a degree of intentionality. It doesn’t bias you against the person as much.
But saying “crossed state line” makes it sound more like the former than the latter - that he made a long trip, a deliberate decision to go far to do this. But it’s misleading, of course, since he lived right by the border and the case was closer to the latter.
I certainly got the impression that he travelled a significant distance in order to get to the protest and it had the intended effect on me (I assumed a greater degree of intentionality to create the situation he was in) but when I found out it was just the next town over it felt like I was deceived, using a technically true statement to imply something more substantial than the actual facts justified.
I think what Rittenhouse did was something shitty, and his acquittal is going to embolden proud boy types to walk around with guns and try to intimidate people and then provoke them so they can then shoot them in “self defense”, but the public characterization of what Rittenhouse did is extremely misleading and actually is kind of the rare case of the sort of media bias conservatives fantasize about and constantly declare to be true.