You’re right, of course. It was the legislature of WI that condoned that behavior by never considering to make arming yourself while looking for trouble illegal.
I think most surprising to me of those verdicts were the verdicts for Huber and McGinnis.
He was charged with reckless homicide for Huber, which I thought might stick – it could be unintentional.
And for McGinnis, he was charged with recklessly endangering him. But, there’s a rule about harm to 3rd parties during self defense that may have wiped that one out since they clearly didn’t think self defense was disproven.
The idea that someone would protest 12 people ruling on evidence and following the rule of law is disgusting. It’s a protest advocating for lynching, essentially, because you’re saying guilt shouldn’t be determined by an impartial jury but that people should simply be convicted because the mob demands it. That is the mindset that led to decades of widespread lynching in the United States and is disgusting and abominable.
Guess I missed the part of the judge’s instructions where he said, “Come back with a Guilty verdict if you don’t approve all of his behavior.”
If that were the case then several other people would have been charged but they were on the other “side” so the outrage would come from another direction
You say that as though anyone here would object to it.
People need to be a lot better at segregating their feelings on the wisdom of Wisconsin open carry laws and the operations of a criminal trial. We are a country of laws; we cannot genuinely advocate for ignoring black letter law in a criminal trial simply because we “really don’t like” what someone did. That is the path to arbitrary justice and an erosion of important protections we all enjoy.
We learned it from you dad Republicans.
I’m not criticizing the jury. I’m criticizing the people who will continue showing up in these situations armed and looking for trouble. (Something I didn’t know people did before this thread)
Well, we’ll have to see what the jury has to say about the bail of straw you just murdered.
No one has said that he was on trial for walking the streets with a gun. You made that up entirely.
What he is on trial for, in case you missed it, was shooting 3 people, killing two and severely wounding a third. The actions that led up to that shooting are relevant to whether or not his responsibility for shooting them was criminal in nature.
So yes, the actions that Rittenhouse took in leading up to shooting these people have been condoned by this verdict. We should expect to see more, as people come out to point guns at demonstrators. With motives anywhere from simply not wanting people to be able to demonstrate against things they don’t want them to demonstrate, to actually wanting to be allowed to kill people and get away with it.
I think there is. If this conduct is legal, then the law needs to be changed. It’s preposterous that you can show up at a protest with an assault weapon and kill people with no consequence. This concept of “I fear for my life” being license to kill has to be fixed.
Yes I do.
The evidence was very clear for acquittal. Apparently Wisconsin does not have a directed verdict, that seemed to be appropriate on the murder charges.
The prosecutor should not be allowed near felony trial again…
I’ve been critical of the prosecutor but I am not 100% sure how much is entirely his fault. This case was charged before the autopsies were completed and before ballistic evidence was even processed, and Binger is not the elected DA of Kenosha County, he works for him. This had, from the beginning, clear evidence of being overcharged and quickly charged for political reasons. It’s notable that the elected DA farmed the case out to a staff attorney, while a lot of elected DAs only rarely appear in court, for a chance to be on TV a lot of times local elected DAs will personally prosecute “high profile” trials. I think it’s telling this one handed it off to a staff prosecutor.
Binger made some fumbles in the trial that I think are on him, but I think he was fighting from underneath because a real bad case was dropped in his lap by his boss.
I really don’t think any verdict would have deterred anyone in the future in this case.
KR may be not guilty but he certainly is not innocent.
What are the odds he gets in more trouble with law over the next year or two?
No, I don’t think so. Most post-verdict protests I’ve seen have been by people who have seen, time and time again, that the justice system is not “impartial” when it comes to them and people who look like them. Specifically, to people like them being killed with impunity.
This case is a bit different, and I’ll bet the protests, if any, will look different, from those past post-verdict protests.
Bingo. “Chaos Tourists” with their AR-15s have been doing this in large number for years now (it picked up tremendously under Trump and during the BLM protests), Rittenhouse was not the first and likely if he had been convicted it may have just enraged some of these people and made them even more prone to do violence on the street.
We really need to fix a situation where we know if the color of the skin of the people involved were reversed, the verdict likely would be different.
No - they will be protesting the law opening the flood gates to vigilante justice. Rittenhouse got a trial, the three people he killed did not.