Yes, this is based on the Wisconsin statute.
I find it hard to believe that the typical juror, let alone 12 of them, can parse and comprehend such elaborately filigreed nuances. What they end up making of this platter of scrambled eggs will just be a crapshoot.
It’s actually not that nuanced. It’s some of the most common sense legal concepts you can find. It’s firmly rooted in common law. Quite simply the jury has to look at it through the defendants eyes and determine if in the moment he was right to fear for his life. There’s little legal minutiae to wade through. In this case the physical acts aren’t even in question.
Isn’t the best defense advice always that the defendant should keep his mouth shut and never testify? Why did Rittenhouse testifying make sense in this case?
I think that is often the advice in cases where there is more dispute about whether the defendant is the person who did the crime, or whether the acts happened.
I think in self defense cases, the conventional wisdom is that the jury wants to hear from the defendant. There are a lot of considerations, of course, that go into the ultimate decision.
According to the legal text he must also determine if the attack is lawful. If he is in possession of disproportionate force and his attacker feels mortally threatened by him then the attack is lawful and his response is not within the privilege (term used in law) of self defense.
Quite simply?
You have provided text of the law and you have provided links to discussion of the law.
Those links require two things the threat must be unlawful and the response must be proportionate. Could you discuss the physical acts in that context? After Rosenbaum was shot were others present reasonable to experience mortal fear? Was a move to disarm Rittenhouse a reasonable legal act? A semi-automatic rifle was now in play, was that proportionate to a skate board and later a pistol?
I cannot find any reporting on the prosecution making this case, but it seems there is a case to be made.
First of all, a pistol is a deadly weapon. It doesn’t matter that one person had a rifle and the other had a pistol, since being shot at close range with either one can be instantly fatal.
Second, you can even shoot someone who is unarmed and plead self-defense and be acquitted if you can show that the person intended to kill you and had the strength and power advantage to,do so. Imagine a woman being beaten by a man who is screaming, ‘I’m going to kill you!’ She can take out a gun and shoot him dead, even though he’s unarmed, if she has no ability to get away and he keeps advancing.
As a matter of law, I’m not sure that’s necessarily true. Wisconsin’s self-defense statute reads “what the person reasonably believes to be an unlawful interference with his or her person,” which leaves open the possibility that the “actor” (the person purporting to act in self-defense) need only “reasonably believe” that the other person was acting unlawfully. That leaves open the possibility of a lawful threat that has been reasonably misunderstood to be an unlawful threat.
It is at least possible that two people, coming upon one another, might each be acting lawfully and each reasonably believe the other is acting unlawfully, and so each be privileged to exercise lawful self-defense against the other.
Which is why the prevalence of firearms (which tend to increase the odds that misunderstandings will become deadly) and the elimination of a duty to retreat (even where retreat might be achieved without risk to the actor) in so-called “stand your ground” states is… problematic to say the least, even discounting the potential for racial bias in application and practice.
It seems then that Senegold was correct to point out the nuances involved, and perhaps my judgement that ‘it’s whatever a scared teen thought at the moment’ is close to the truth.
Completely different topic, watching the drone video (because the first shooting seems really important), what I don’t get is… when Rittenhouse shot his first victim… if he was so scared… why did he circle back around to the spot where he shot the guy? Why didn’t he just keep running? And it’s not just that he turned and ran a different direction (like back where he’d started, trying to get to a safe space that his first victim had placed himself in between), but actually seemed to circle back to and examine the body of his victim.
And for those who have not seen and do not want to see the drone video, I will just say that it does not match the mental imagine I had before hand. That of Rittenhouse “standing his ground” like the tough guy with a gun he is, his first victim approaching–lunging for the barrel–and Rittenhouse reacting by shooting. No. This is a chase already, with Rittenhouse sort of running (more like trotting, certainly not sprinting) away from his first victim for reasons unknown, and then deciding, after not putting too much effort into running, to turn and shoot at which point the alleged “lunge” by his first victim occurs. Doesn’t look to me like Rittenhouse was trying too hard to escape, and it doesn’t look like his first victim had an opportunity to reach for the weapon (if he did at all) until the moment Rittenhouse turned to shoot him.
Anyway, he shoots hit first victim, does a 180 around a couple cars in a lot, seems to have a clear path to keep on running but then… he circles back towards his victim at a walking pace. Which seems pretty cold-blooded to me.
I can frame it completely differently.
Rittenhouse starts by trotting away from a guy, looking to just put space between himself and the threatening person. So he runs a ways, then turns to see if the guy is following him and holy shit he’s right there, reaching for his gun. Kid panicks, shoots and runs, then stops and thinks, “I better go back and see if the guy needs medical attention.” Kid fancied himself a medic. So he turns and cautiously circles back to check on him, when he realizes the other people coming at him, and runs again.
I have no idea if that’s what the kid was thinking, but that framing is equally supported by the facts in evidence.
No, and the fact you say this again shows you keep just refusing to accept the part that has been pointed out that there is a standard of objective reasonableness. The way you phrase it “whatever a scared teen thinks” suggests that self-defense law can be based on the mental contortions of someone regardless of how insane they are, for example if I saw someone “eyeballing” me 200 yards away and knelt down and shot them in the head with a rifle because I was “afraid.” That is not objectively reasonable, the objective reasonableness part of it is the important part that you entirely eliminate by suggesting it comes down solely to what a random teenager might think. The answer is what the teenager thinks is important, because it has to be evaluated by a jury to see if they think his thoughts and actions meet an objective reasonableness standard, not simply that his thoughts and actions prove he was “scared.”
Part of the issue is there were dozens to hundreds of people all around moving, many of whom seemed vaguely or actively hostile to Rittenhouse, so to some degree just beelining in a straight direction only offers potential escape. With the Rosenbaum shooting we know that Rittenhouse after their initial contact, continued walking down the sidewalk (going in the direction he had been going) and Rosenbaum follows–the Rittenhouse takes off running across the parking lot as he realizes he is being chased, we know from the testimony of McGinnis that Rittenhouse turned around when Joshua Ziminski (who has admitted to this) fired a “warning shot” that was fired from the same direction and quite close to where Rosenbaum was. It is still unclear what Ziminski’s motivation was in firing a “warning shot”, or if him and Rosenbaum were associates (they had been seen together earlier in the night, but this was a chaotic situation with lots of people moving around willy nilly for hours.)
Rittenhouse turned when he heard a gunshot, which actually helps corroborate his self-defense claim because if you think someone is shooting at you running away suddenly becomes a less viable option. From the drone video it looks like Rosenbaum was basically inches away from reaching Rittenhouse’s gun.
In case it hasn’t been posted on this thread yet it’s called “weapon, intent, delivery system”.
If any one of those is absent the person claiming self defense is going to have a problem making his case. It appears to me that all the people Rittenhouse shot satisfied this standard.
FWIW I think the shooting of Rosenbaum is the least complex of the self-defense claims, the fact we have like two different videos (a close-up drone video, and the overhead black and white video) showing Rittenhouse fleeing, the fact we have a person who admits he was firing warning shots, the fact we have an eye witness who says Rittenhouse was fleeing and only turned to fire as he was being caught–that’s honestly going to be fairly unambiguous self-defense in most states in the country. That’s not even a stand your ground situation, that’s literally a textbook example of a defendant “exhausting his duty to flee” and only firing when caught by his pursuer.
The chaotic shooting of Huber and Grosskreutz has some elements to it that get more complex. For example, Rittenhouse squeezes off several rounds essentially “Into the crowd” (it’s pure luck that no one other than Huber and Grosskreutz were shot) during that confrontation, which might be a criminal action since you can argue they weren’t really self-defense rounds, but you can also argue he was knocked to the ground and firing wildly to save his life–but firing wildly carries different legal connotations than firing deliberately. I kind of suspect an acquittal on almost all charges, but it wouldn’t necessarily surprise me if he gets some kind of reckless endangerment conviction, because he is charged with that as well.
Yeah. As he was falling forward being shot. I also don’t see how Rittenhouse fearing he was being shot at squares with his leisurely walk back towards his first victim’s body.
Whether or not Rittenhouse is legally acquitted of homicide (and that should depend in large part on what led his fist victim to begin chasing after him), he is and will remain a murderer in my eyes.
I think you misunderstood me when I said physical acts. In most cases the actions taken are up in the air. It’s up to the jury to decide what happened. In the Rittenhouse case both sides agree to what happened. The shooting of the second two victims is on video. A witness said Rosenbaum was attempting to get Rittenhouse’s weapon before he was shot. That was a prosecution witness so the prosecution does not dispute it. The facts of the case are not in dispute. Whether or not it was legitimately self defense is up to the jury.
As to what others felt and if it was reasonable is irrelevant to the trial. Only one person is on trial.
I don’t know, if there was an argument to be made about him moving back towards the body it was not really raised by the prosecutor, so either they did not consider it relevant to the claim or it lacks the importance you think it does–the drone video was seen and evaluated before the jury days ago. Keep in mind there are literally swarms of people in every direction, so it’s a little hard to explain every single step someone takes.
FWIW Rosenbaum was very close to him when he was shot–he wasn’t “sucked in” closer to Rittenhouse via some weird magic bullet that yanked him in closer, he fell so close to Rittenhouse because he was so close to Rittenhouse, you don’t have to let someone physically reach you before you shoot them in self-defense, if they are chasing you and behaving in a manner to suggest you have to fear for your life. Like a cop doesn’t let someone charging them tackle them then shoot, and many of the same parameters apply in civilian self-defense.
I get it. There are laws that say you don’t even have to run if you can, much less that you have to keep running until exhaustion. But what I see is Rittenhouse trying not very hard to get away from his soon to be victim, turning and shooting his victim, and then taking a leisurely walk back around to his victim. That is not compatible with a desperate flight from hostiles all around. If he was so afraid of all the other protestors, the last thing to do would be to stop running and turn back to his victim at a walking pace. If he heard a gun shot, he also heard his victim running after him (again, his victim that he wasn’t trying very hard to get away from). He could not possibly have imagined that his very close victim was the source of the gun shot. He knew someone was, for whatever reason, chasing him and he knew that if he slowed and turned towards that person his only option would be to shoot. And he was so not desperate to get away from protestors and the sound of other gunfire nearby that he slowed to a walk and circled back to his victim.
I don’t see any evidence of “not trying very hard” to get away from, both the aerial surveillance video and the drone video show him running. When the confrontation between Rosenbaum and Rittenhouse begins, the Ziminskis and Rosenbaum are basically on top of him (you can see this much more clearly in the FBI aerial video than the drone), and then he cuts across the parking lot. After he shoots Rosenbaum, the direction he was running was actually the same direction the highest concentration of protesters was, as well, like a crowd of 25+ people, so it’s possible he wanted to avoid running into them. I don’t really know because it isn’t my job to explain what he did after the shooting, generally speaking the only relevance for the self-defense claim was did he have a reasonable fear at the time he fired, and I don’t see anything in either video that is out of line with that.
I think his story was he was trying to “get to police” after the shooting, so that could also be why he changed direction, but it doesn’t seem like the prosecutor even considered this a very salient point.