A bunch of white people are going to riot because a white guy shot 3 other white guys and got away with it?
You misspelled peaceful protests.
So would I. If for no other reason, it’s likely to spill over into my backyard.
Not particularly. He seems very arrogant in an “I am the law” kind of way that many long sitting judges have. He has a reputation for being hard on prosecutors in all cases. It’s just that some people’s sympathies are not usually in line with that side. The two issues he came down hard on the prosecutor for were valid fuck ups that he should have come down on. He revels in his eccentricities but he hasn’t shown actionable bias in my opinion.
Boogaloo Boys gotta do their thang:
Regardless of how this turns out, it would be nice if someone was to give him the back of their hand as hard as they can.
Right. And I do believe Trevor Noah was spot on:
Nobody drives into a city with guns because they love someone else’s business that much. That’s some bulls**t. No one has ever thought, “Oh, it’s my solemn duty to pick up a rifle and protect that. T. J. Maxx.” They do it because they’re hoping to shoot someone.
Same. If the National Guard has to be called in to grease 'em with prejudice, so much the better.
Yeah, in real trials (as opposed to TV/movies) I’ve seen or read transcripts of, it’s always been explained in front of the jury by the officer who gave the chain-of-custody testimony how the firearm has been made safe. Usually a cable lock. Something that prevents any loading or operation of the firearm, put on by the person who has brought it to court, and explained as not part of the evidence, but put on to make it safe.
Sequential thread titles just observed in MPSIMS:
– The Rittenhouse trial
– More Jokes
So, now it is a matter of the instructions of the judge and the case made by the prosecution. The fact that the jury requested copies of the first six pages of instructions indicates they have a strong, experienced fore person.
On the privilege of self defense the prosecution posited that a robust, intelligent, prudent, lifeguard (Rittenhouse) would not have been mortally threatened by the bare hands of the smaller Rosenbaum. The force used to repel Rosenbaum far exceeded what was necessary. Rittenhouse exercised only one of his options. He shot and completely disabled Rosenbaum. He then shot Rosenbaum in the hand specifically removing his only weapon. With Rosenbaum disarmed and disabled, Rittenhouse shot him in the back killing Rosenbaum. That establishes intent to kill.
I believe self defense will be denied and Rittenhouse will be found guilty on count 1.
Using the link provided by Martin_Hyde upthread I downloaded and printed the 36 pages of jury instructions.
I missed the edit window
Link here
I will say I am not persuaded by the prosecutor’s position that, even where an imminent threat warranting lethal force exists, (1) it is unreasonable to fire several shots in quick succession, and (2) each shot must therefore be treated as as a distinct act of self-defense, with its own calculus applied.
That’s just not how guns work, and it’s not how people work (not their bodies, not their minds under pressure). But of course that would be for the defense to argue. I only listened to the prosecution’s closing argument because, frankly, I’m not interested in sitting through two hours of hearing Rittenhouse’s side of the story. Call me biased. This is not a court of law and I am not a juror.
True when we just see a teen doing something really stupid. But this is the law and granularity is important.
The only thing to be evaluated is the prosecution case. The instructions do not cover several shots in quick succession. The law only covers how the prosecution presented what happened and when. That is carefully dissected by following the instructions of the judge.
Now the jury fore person is more important than the judge, the prosecutor or the law.
That is however exactly how courts have worked on many occasions. You can be justified shooting twice but the third is what gets you convicted.
That is how guns work, and how the law works. Unless you’re suggesting Rittenhouse had a full auto ‘AR’ that no one’s mentioned?
The next thing I said about how people work (both body and mind) is important.
(1) You can’t be guaranteed that one shot, two shots, or even three or four shots are going to stop someone charging at you (particularly if you might miss, even at close range—but then even if every shot hits, depending on where it hits).
(2) By the time you realize that you have, in fact, stopped someone charging at you, you may well have fired off additional shots.
If Rittenhouse had unloaded his entire magazine on Rosenbaum and kept shooting even as he was not only falling, but down on the ground and immobile, I’d agree that’s excessive, even if Rosenbaum had posed a lethal threat before. But I very much doubt Rittenhouse knew—or could possibly have known—how effective his first shot was (shattering the hip?), and given how much has been made, even now and in hindsight of the “lunging vs. falling” distinction, by the time a reasonable person would realize that their supposed threat was, in fact, falling, I can easily see how four shots went off. And I can understand why, at close range (and after some level of physical activity) rapid fire was warranted.
That is assuming, of course, Rittenhouse otherwise acted reasonably up until he opened fire and had a right to self-defense. I don’t think he did. But if the defense didn’t bring in an expert to elicit testimony as to how effective (or ineffective) guns may be in the very short term, how difficult it can be to discern the effectiveness of gunfire against a dynamic target at close range, and how reaction time factors in to the decision to stop firing, then they did a bad job.
Which, hey, if the defense did do a bad job, then I’m all for it. I hope the little twerp gets hauled off bawling to prison.
But, the instructions require that the defense be proportionate to the threat. Were multiple gun shots required to stop the threat of mortal injury. Did the prosecution determine at what point the threat was removed?
It doesn’t matter at what point the prosecution was able to determine the threat was removed. It matters at what point a hypothetical reasonable person in Rittenhouse’s shoes would have perceived the threat (if there was one) was removed. The prosecution gets the benefit of a body, a medical examiner, and time to conduct a literal forensic exam. Rittenhouse—even the reasonable person in Rittenhouse’s shoes—does not. They can only go off what they perceive, as they perceive it, accounting for the time it takes to process our senses and decide on how to act (or stop acting).
That the prosecution can show, conclusively, that Rosenbaum was disabled with the first shot is not so much irrelevant as it is just part of the story. It matters at what point Rittenhouse had reason to perceive he’d dealt a disabling injury, and what a reasonable person would think of employing a fire arm in self-defense at close range. The defense might have sought to educate the jury on that, but then if it didn’t that may be one of many things to prove fatal to Rittenhouse’s case as the prosecution made a bid deal of the idea that each shot could be considered in isolation as its own act.
Yeah, which is partially why I think the most important part of the case the prosecutor put forward was the forensic expert that talked about the angle the bullets struck Rosenbaum. I think you can actually convict on some of these charges as a jury, but I also think you could acquit. It’s hard for me to get a solid feel for the overall strength of the prosecution / defense cases because even though I’ve invested some time into it, I have not watched every minute of the trial like the jury has (nor would I willingly do that.)
There were several things that came into the trial that IMO were quite bad for the prosecution’s case, but the tail end of the trial I think the prosecutor scored some hits. This would not be an easy deliberation in the jury room. It’s really entirely proper for the jury to decide to not treat a few shots in rapid succession any different than one shot in terms of assessing Rittenhouse’s motivations, but the jury could also choose to look at it another way.
A case I’m familiar with from the early 90s that I often think about in terms of jury discretion involved a guy one of my sisters went to High School with. He was working at an office and one of his coworkers was a woman going through a very nasty divorce. She needed a ride to work that week because of some car work she was having done, so he had offered to give her a lift to and from each day because they lived near one another.
Well the husband whom she was separated from gets behind them on the interstate one afternoon and runs them off the road. He walks around to the driver’s side of the car and unloads every bullet from a revolver into the guy and his wife. He then fully reloads the revolver, and empties it again, gets in his car and drives off. Both of them die.
He ended up being convicted of manslaughter under the premise that he was in the “heat of passion” when he committed the shooting, because his defense argued that he saw his wife with another man and went into a fury. Now the prosecution strongly argued he had been stalking his wife, deliberately followed them, and reloaded a revolver and emptied it a second time which suggested he was calculating and not in the “heat of passion.” The jury disagreed. He did 15 years or so, I remember it making the papers back home when he got released on probation in the mid-2000s, after which I believe he changed his name and moved to a different area of the country.
I always thought the jury really fucked that ruling up, but at the end of the day it is their discretion, and they can come to a decision quite different from what the public wants.