If the family hasn’t figured out grifting by now, I’m sure someone will be along shortly to show them how to get it, and take a cut. The people who donated will be fine with this.
As case law, the result is what we would expect from precedent.
If Rittenhouse was non-white and declared guilty then, yes, that would be a travesty. That’s not the trial that happened, though, and that’s fairly irrelevant to the matter at hand.
For the trial that actually happened, where all parties involved were white, nothing spectacular happened from a legal nor precedential standpoint.
In general, the trial seems to be big news more for the desires that it gives people to have it be something racially charged. The reality is that it isn’t. It’s a “stand your ground” case, and a reasonably clear cut version of one.
My take is that Rittenhouse took his AR to the protest scene so he could parade around with his gun and look like a badass. I don’t believe he intended to shoot people. I don’t believe he thought anyone would challenge or confront him because he had his magic weapon and everyone would recognize his mastery of the scenario because he was armed with his cool ass gun. But, people did confront and challenge him, he panicked and shot some people.
He should have stayed home but he didn’t. The people that confronted him should have steered clear of a kid with an assault rifle. They didn’t.
I think you’ve got that right. The tricky part is that he played stupid games, and other people “won” the prizes. It feels like there should be consequences. In an open carry state, I don’t see how to fix this.
What would the law that applies to these circumstances be in a non-open carry state?
I think Rittenhouse attracted attention by openly carrying an AR. I posit that visible weapons amped the variability of the situation and made violence more likely, not less.
I agree with that, but the controlling fact was (as CoolHandCox posted):
There really was no getting around this feature of Wisconsin law. And I suspect that those urging the federal government to bring criminal charges against Rittenhouse would be disappointed due to the fact that Rittenhouse apparently was acting in a way consistent with the laws of the state in which he was doing his chaos-tourism.
Best hope for some justice may be civil suits by the families of the men he killed (but even there the Wisconsin law will be on Rittenhouse’s side).
Da Kidd is in demand!
But that’s okay. There will be plenty of Rittenhouses to fill the demand.
I mean I posted the Wisconsin jury instructions, it makes it quite clear that self-defense has to be demonstrated to have not occurred, by the prosecution, beyond a reasonable doubt.
3 professional rioters meet up with there darkest dream! After today looting & burning will not be the same ! I don’t under stand looting & burning and never will.
You might be surprised to find out lynching has a broader conception than racist lynching. Racist lynching was motivated by racism, but there were widespread extrajudicial lynching in the United States and even in other parts of the Western world before the late 19th century. There are widespread extrajudicial lynchings in some parts of the world to this day–for example there are regions of Bolivia where the central government has a quasi-official policy of not sanctioning or condoning, but “not interfering with” what is called “traditional” forms of justice, but we would in many cases refer to these as lynchings.
A lynching is an execution without due process, there was an epidemic of such things targeted at blacks, for the reasons we all know, that didn’t start to taper off until the 1930s and didn’t decline to be (thankfully) rare until 25-30 years later. However there have always been other types of lynchings as well. A lynching is an execution without due process of law, and is the core belief behind it, even above racial animus, is the belief that it is valid to kill someone due to the passions of the mob and outside the legal system.
Hypothetical: you call someone a Mother****er; in response they rush you in a rage. You decide discretion is the better part of valor and run; but you unfortunately trip and they catch up with you and start beating you. Only we’re not talking about a black eye, a bloody nose or a tooth knocked out: this individual shows every sign of intending to beat you to death. As a last resort you pull a clutch piece and shoot them dead.
Now maybe you started it, but have you so completely forfeited a claim of self-defense that legally you’d be required to let them beat you to death? Or alternatively should some lesser sentence than murder be available in situations when the shooter is not completely blameless?
I can only assume you misread my initial post in this series–if you reread it you will note I said:
I had hoped I had made it clear I was not talking about all fifty states, but was commenting on the way it is done in many States. My initial comment was restricted to the States that operate in the way I described, and my subsequent comments were continuing along those lines. Never was I intentionally speaking about universal law–nor is it my habit to do so, it should be understood as the background to any legal discussion in the United States that we have 50 States, and 50 criminal justice systems, with significant variations in court processes and criminal laws (we also have a few other CJ systems like the Federal, several territorial systems, D.C.'s court system et al.)
I’ve had a bit of trouble deciphering what exactly you’re on about since I haven’t clearly understood when you’re often just repeating things I feel I’ve already said, but in a sense that makes me think you’re expressing disagreement, and I can only assume the initial confusion stemmed from you being under the impression I was proclaiming some sort of ex cathedra rule that applies to every State, which was not the case. I was intending to talk about the way “many States” with self-defense laws similar to Wisconsin operate. I also think I made it clear with my later many (most?) construction I was not asserting to know what actual percentage of States function this way.
I do know, and this is actually where a lot of the knowledge comes from–from the Zimmerman case, Florida has a very similar self-defense construction to Wisconsin this is even without taking into account Stand Your Ground, despite all the media attention on Florida’s SYG law; it was not actual an element in the Zimmerman trial, Zimmerman’s defense did not assert privileges under SYG and did not request a SYG hearing pre-trial, as is their right if they wish to try and do so–Zimmerman was acquitted on the normal Florida construction of self-defense.
The jury instructions in Zimmerman read:
I don’t think there’s any state where you totally forfeit your right of self-defense just because you are the person who provoked a conflict, but the specifics end up being really important. Like you have very little right for example to shoot people while robbing a bank “because they’re trying to shoot you”, for a number of reasons. Them trying to shoot you is legal, you trying to rob a bank is not.
In a sort of angry affray like you describe, in most states, despite being the provoker, the fact you attempted to disengage from conflict and were being violently assaulted would likely mean you would succeed in your self-defense claim, if the jury felt they believed it otherwise.
I don’t think you can shoot somebody just because they are robbing a bank.
You can actually, it’s fairly well established that a bank’s armed guards can use lethal force to protect the bank. In fact I’d be interested to see if you could find a single case in the history of the United States in which someone in a bank was convicted of a crime for shooting a bank robber, regardless of circumstance.
There isn’t AFAIK any special legal privilege to shoot people for robbing a bank, but rather the jurisprudence around self-defense is such that it’s almost a universal understanding that an armed bank robber is a lethal threat to everyone in the bank, and meeting that force with lethal force is inherent self-defense. In some States, like Texas, which allows lethal force to protect property, there is more of a specially delineated privilege in this regard, but I would be substantially surprised if you can conjure up even a single case of a bank’s guard or a police officer being convicted of a crime for shooting a bank robber in the process of committing an armed robbery.
It sounds like we may have been talking past each other a bit. Coolhandcox brought up the type of self defense in which the defendant has the burden, and I commented both on the type Wisconsin has and the type some other states have, where the defendant has the burden.
I may have misunderstood your response, and you obviously must have missed in my post 1199 that I was contrasting states where a defendant has to prove self defense with states where the state has to disprove it.
I am well aware of jurisdictional differences. It’s what I was talking about.
Just to point out, the US as a whole is a common law
country, and at common law or “classic” affirmative defence, the defendant just has to raise the offered defence and “clear the evidential burden” What about and will schools that was a favour? Racing a few rays for example, ie make it a live issue at trial. Once that’s done, the prosecution has to disprove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
I haven’t been participating in this thread and that’s not a reply to me, but it caught my attention.
I guess the truth of that statement depends on how you define “meaningful”. The pertinent aspect of a Supreme Court opinion is that it carries the authority to make it the law of the land. It is decidedly not that it infallibly embodies greater wisdom than a contrary opinion. What it tends to embody, in fact, rather notoriously and almost predictably, is the partisan divide between the justices and the political makeup of the Court at any point in time.
For example, you cited District of Columbia v Heller (2008) in your contention that gun-totin’ self-defense is somehow a Constitutional right. That was the one where Scalia declared that the part of the Second Amendment that begins “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State” was mere decoration and could be ignored in determining what the framers “really” meant, despite this preamble being a plainly self-evident statement of purpose. It was, in short, an astonishingly asinine ruling in the opinion of constitutional scholars and as reflected in John Paul Stevens’ blistering dissent, an opinion held by four of the nine justices. It was clearly reflective of a post-hoc justification for a predetermined desire by the conservative majority to support and expand gun rights.
I made clear from my post that while those are Second Amendment cases, that was not why I was citing them. What’s notable is that in several of those cases, for example jurists like Breyer, even acknowledge the “core right of self-defense.” This actually is not that controversial, self-defense is actually an incredibly well-established right in English common law, and has been reinforced as a broadly understood right for 245 years in the United States, in the colonial courts that predated our country, and has been enshrined in numerous statutes, some State constitutions, and numerous court rulings. My main reason for pointing out the Supreme Court was to emphasize how well it is established, because frankly I’ve had a lot of back-and-forth conversation with the person I was talking to (Crane) in this thread, where he has willfully and deliberately ignored or either rejected legal concepts that are not remotely political outside of the SDMB, but basically “well understood under the law.” My hope was by pointing out even the Supreme Court, which, as you mention, is frequently political and has divergent opinions on things, largely does not view self-defense as a controversial concept. Firearms ownership and possession? Sure, but that’s not what our discussion was about.
The Second Amendment is ripe with controversy, but self-defense generally isn’t. The Second Amendment also, for what it is worth, is not directly relevant at all to Rittenhouse’s case, what’s telling is all of those recent Second Amendment cases speak to differing levels about the existence of a basic right to self-defense that’s a broadly understood right we have.
If I had been making a Second Amendment, and not a self-defense argument, your post would have had more merit. FWIW the reason the Second Amendment isn’t relevant is Rittenhouse’s right to walk around the streets of Kenosha with a gun are due to Wisconsin laws and the Wisconsin state constitution, so the Second Amendment is not directly relevant.