The Rittenhouse trial

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
642

This actually shocked me in how it was of even lower quality than your previous post expressing a legal opinion–it may be one of the lowest quality posts ever posted on these forums talking about the law.

Our system puts a lot of faith in jurors, there is an actual expectation in the jury room you don’t use things you’ve been told not to consider to render your decision. I think you would be surprised by how often jurors appropriately exclude things they were told to exclude. Now, that being said our system also recognizes that things can’t truly be “unheard.” Extremely prejudicial things introduced at trial, over a judge’s objection, will sometimes result in a mistrial for this reason. The prosecutor was kind of skirting that line but he’s an experienced litigator and probably guessed it wouldn’t get thrown out, or gambled he might do better in the next trial if it did (hoping it wasn’t thrown out with prejudice.) I’m not 100% certain because I didn’t watch that portion, but I don’t think the jury has actually seen the video in question, it was just obliquely referenced by the prosecutor.

There are generally limits on how much you can bring things that don’t directly relate to the charges the state has brought against the defendant into the court to use against the defendant. Sometimes when the defendant takes the stand, their testimony may open the door to evidence previously barred being admissible, to refuse something the defendant said on the stand. But it’s often a very “close” matter, and usually with a bit of subjectivity, those decisions actually are ones where the individual judge and their overall philosophy and manner of running a trial actually matter, so one judge might rule one way and another might rule another way.

This is all by the way, “part and parcel” of our common law adversarial legal system. While there are plenty of statutory codes, rules of judicial procedure etc that quite rigidly codify large portions of our judicial / criminal justice system, there is still a lot left up to the individual judge, the attorneys and the jury. Our trials are not algorithmic and do not produce the exact same result with the exact same inputs, because it is understood to be intrinsically valid that one judge might rule a different way than another and one jury might rule differently than another, as long as those rulings are within the bounds of some pretty liberal boundaries, that’s considered fine.

Nitpick and it’s minor to someone (I assume) isn’t much interested in guns–but AK refers to the “Kalashnikov family of rifles”, so called because they were designed by Russian general and gun designer Mikhail Kalashnikov. The first being the very famous AK-47 first mass produced in 1949, there have been many variants since then–the AK-74, AK-105 etc etc.

Rittenhouse had an AR-variant rifle, not an AK, and in the video he referenced his AR, not an AK (stop reading here if you don’t care about guns.). The AR family of rifles comes from the company name Armalite. The first major rifle in that family being the AR-10 released to the civilian market in the 1950s. It was revised in the late 1950s to the AR-15, which was then sold to Colt who took that design and produced the famous M-16 rifle for the U.S. military starting in the 1960s. The M-16 family of rifles was used by the military heavily for some 30 years, before it started being gradually phased out for some units with the carbine-variant M4, and by modern times the M4 is the predominant variant used by the U.S. Armed Forces in most circumstances. All of these guns now have a number of manufacturers and different configurations, many of which are legal for the civilian gun market–where they are almost invariably referred to as “AR” variants, although they have many different trade names and brand names different manufacturers will use. For many years only Colt models could use the letters “M4” in marketing and selling these guns, as it held a trademark on that, but the trademark was eventually ruled invalid and a court held that “M4” is a generic term for an AR-family carbine rifle, but before that “AR” was the most easily coined phrase that people would understand to encompass all of that family of rifles, and thus has more or less “stuck” in the gun lexicon.

643

It’s not if 17 year old Kyle Rittenhouse feels he was reasonable. The jury has to take his actions and compare it to a hypothetical objectively reasonable person and determine if the actions were reasonable. If the standard was whatever the person accused thought was reasonable then there would never be a need for a trial.

644

Perhaps so. I’m just a dumb engineer.

So please explain how it does not refer to the reasonable judgement of the 17 year old person involved.

645

He’s told you repeatedly, you are either incapable or unwilling to read / process what he has said. The “reasonable person” standard simply is a legal construct, it does not mean “did Rittenhouse think he was acting reasonably.”

646
647

How has “stop killing unarmed black men” become political?

648

The point under discussion is not the correctness of standard legal construct. The point under discussion is whether or not the instructions given by reading the law will make it clear to the jurors. You have explained why it will not.

649

You might want to look at where the provocation law has been quoted at least twice in this thread. In this context, it is about whether Rittenhouse provoked the use of force, which would place limits on his ability to use force in response.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/judge-rittenhouse-trial-will-not-allow-jury-consider-lesser-charge-shooting-2021-11-12/

650

It might not say that fear is all that’s needed but we’ve seen, over the past few years alone, just how un-true, or at least how low the bar is, for that “reasonable belief” and many people feel that that is what is unreasonable: how low the bar is set for a person to kill another without repercussions.

Crawling on the floor, nearly naked, surrounded by cops? Yeah, that’s a “reasonable” person to fear and shoot to death.

Cops think you’re selling loose cigarettes? Apparently you deserve to die, right?

How many more examples do you need?

Your assertions that “fear is not all that’s needed” are undercut by the things we’ve all seen and read about, many of them recently.

651

In considering this whopper of a false equivalency, it occurs to me that the taking of a Seattle Police precinct building is about as close as one could come to endeavoring to overthrow a democratically elected US government, threatening to execute its VP, and overturning a prima facie Presidential election.

And it really isn’t particularly close – heinous though it was.

Generally, you’re comparing a coup attempt to multiple smash-and-grabs at footwear stores, looting, and fairly widespread property damage – none of which I condone, but … they really aren’t particularly comparable.

652

Not really. For each one of the incidents that you can throw out in a one sentence summation we could have another 600 post thread on why or why not we are comparing apples and oranges. In particular when speaking about use of force with the police where they are not just allowed to defend themselves but also are required and allowed at times to use force to do their jobs.

Regardless of all of that the legal standards are still the standards. The law is still the law. It’s still up to a jury of citizens to decide what is reasonable.

653

Again, you are 100% incorrect. Every jury instruction I have ever seen on the reasonable person standard makes it clear it is an objective standard and it goes to great pains to explain what that means. The judge also generally will answer any questions the jurors may have about the standard as well. You’re simply talking out of your ass here, to be frank, you don’t know what the reasonable person standard is as it intersects with self-defense cases, you do not know how it is commonly used at trial, you do not understand how juries commonly use it. There has been essentially no point here whatsoever in which you’ve said anything that suggests you have even the most basic grasp of what is being discussed–which is a shame, because multiple posters have given you fairly plain-language articles to read that would clarify much of this for you.

654

You shouldn’t generally conflate the reasonable officer standard with the reasonable person standard in self-defense cases. They are not actually the precise same thing. In the case out West where that guy was literally crawling on his hands and knees while that was an ugly case, and I very firmly believe the officer should have been convicted of some charge, there’s a complex legal environment around the police and use of force. There is also tremendous entrenched goodwill in the community in most regions of the country for the police. This makes it very hard to obtain convictions against law enforcement officers, and anything more than that would be its own thread (I actually think we did have a thread on the incident you mention.)

But there are any number of murder cases where self-defense is raised by the defendant and the defendant ends up getting convicted. Finding statistics on how often this happens isn’t easy, but at least going off my limited knowledge of local criminal cases, I’d note that it’s not unusual that a person accused of murder offers up some explanation. Frequently: “I didn’t do it”, “I wasn’t there”, “It was self-defense” or “I was insane.” Prosecutors win almost all of their prosecutions, and I do not believe simply asserting self-defense is a magic talisman that assures your acquittal, if it were I feel like prosecutors would have a much lower conviction rate (in most jurisdictions, of cases prosecutors bring to trial, they often have conviction rates over 95%, and the total number of cases that result in a guilty plea instead of a conviction at trial is also very high.) The self-defense cases that make national news tend to be the toughest, most extreme cases, that often have very complex legal elements with a good argument by the defendant that they may be acting in self-defense, and then usually various “outrage” generating factors to produce media interest. It probably isn’t a good idea to assume most murder cases look like this or that self-defense is a get out of jail free card for a murder. There is a framing of facts that really need to be present for a self-defense claim to carry much water–note that in some cases a judge can literally decline to even give the jury a self-defense instruction, essentially saying the defense had so poorly presented its evidence of self-defense that the judge isn’t even allowing the jurors to consider the claim in their ruling.

655

You do have a point that police have gotten away with murder with that reasonable belief standard and it’s inexplicable in many cases. Hell, NYTimes just had an article on police putting themselves near the path of an oncoming vehicle in order to justify shooting into and at the oncoming vehicle. However, a standard that is misapplied doesn’t mean that the standard is a poor standard. In an imperfect world filled with violent threats there will be times, probably every minute or second even, in which responding to that violent threat with lethal force is necessary/justified.

656

I stand rebuked by your eloquent critique.

The links provided were interesting. Especially the part about endurance and proportionality.

657

Which is what the prosecutor wanted to do - impeach Rittenhouse’s testimony.

658

There’s actually both an objective and a subjective component, and those will be explained to the jury.

In general terms, and limiting discussion to this single issue, the jury first has to decide if Rittenhouse subjectively actually believed that he was being imminently threatened with an unlawful use of force that could cause death or grievous bodily injury. This is about whether the jury believes his claim is sincere.

Second, the jury has to decide if Rittenhouse’s belief, if he had one, that he was in mortal danger from an unlawful use of force was an objectively reasonable belief. That is, would a reasonable person have had the same belief under those circumstances?

If the jury answers yes to both, then those parts of the self defense claim are fulfilled.

If the jury believes that Rittenhouse was sincere in his belief but it was an unreasonable one, it’s called imperfect self defense, and it just becomes a mitigating factor that reduces the crime from first to second degree homicide.

If the jury doesn’t buy that he subjectively believed it, the self-defense defense just fails altogether.

659

And I’d imagine this is specific to Wisconsin? As in other jurisdictions there may not, for instance, be mitigation in the form of imperfect self-defense.

660

Thanks, that’s much like the instructions I’ve received on jury duty.

661

Wisconsin does allow imperfect self defense apparently. Most states don’t. The ones that do can interpret it differently. It’s hard to get a simple list because of all of the permutations of case law.