Rittenhouse Trial

[Longes2]

Ah. So your cool plan is to keep calling me a nazi. No reason to continue talking then.

[Omegonthesane]

Maybe if you don't want to be called a Nazi you should stop being obstinately wrong about court cases in the same way that Nazis are.

[erik]

Near as I can tell Rittenhouse is an immature child who got to act out his murder fantasy, found out it was scarier than expected, and is now getting to hobnob with his fascist heroes. That said, it does seem like his actions shots fired in each of the 3 encounters can be justified as self-defense in that moment. Twice physically attacked and after that threatened by a person with a pistol.

Now I would wish that the law would prevent people from open carrying assault rifles into a riot especially with a curfew. I would hope the adult that provided the weapon would be doing so illegally and would go to jail. And if the parent who drove him knew that he was going to be so armed or intending to violate said laws then could be tried as an accessory.

I have no legal expertise, but a lawyer who seems to be intelligent convinced me that the judge was not that absurd. LegalEagle on the Rittenhouse Judge (YouTube)

If the guy with the pistol had killed Rittenhouse then he would probably be getting off too. That's what happens when you get stupid laws that let people carry around deadly weapons and can use them if they feel that they are threatened. Our incredibly stupid mix of self defense doctrines and ubiquity of arms leads to this shit and will keep happening.

[Whatever Jr.]

Ah. So your cool plan is to keep calling me a nazi. No reason to continue talking then.

"I'm going to stop making Nazi talking points because you called me a Nazi" is one hell of a self-own.

[Grek]

The LegalEagle video seems mostly good, except for the part where he seemed to think excluding the video of Rittenhouse saying that he wanted to 'kill looters' was reasonable. A video in which Rittenhouse explains that his motive was to go 'kill looters' because they are 'rioting and looting' very clearly demonstrates that he went there intending to be a vigilante and was not acting in self defense. If that's prejudicial, what the hell isn't?

[Kaelik]

The LegalEagle video seems mostly good, except for the part where he seemed to think excluding the video of Rittenhouse saying that he wanted to 'kill looters' was reasonable. A video in which Rittenhouse explains that his motive was to go 'kill looters' because they are 'rioting and looting' very clearly demonstrates that he went there intending to be a vigilante and was not acting in self defense. If that's prejudicial, what the hell isn't?

This is an extremely common legal opinion (that excluding the video is correct) because the idea is that the video has little probative value (showing the thing it would be introduced to show) because these events happened BEFORE and seemingly mostly unrelated to his decision to go to the BLM protests, and their prejudicial value would be very large (the jury is likely to see this comment as something he was saying about the decision he was making.)

The video is really showing that he has the CHARACTER of a person who would go to a protest to do murders, but the video wasn't about this specific decision, and the jury would assume it was and that therefore the video is about the ACTUAL DECISION.

Now, 1) You can definitely be sure that hundreds of times a year this decision is made the opposite direction to introduce potentially prejudicial information against poor, primarily black, defendants.

2) Our criminal legal system allows you to introduce someone's conviction for selling drugs 10 years ago as proof that they have the "character" of a "liar" in a drug case, where it's prejudicial value is obviously significantly more then any possible probative value all the time.

In general I think the main problem this particular exclusion points to is that whether the judge empathizes with you (a fascist murderer) or doesn't (any black person at all) has a huge impact on how your hypothetical trial (that 97% of the time you will never get) will turn out.

But the second, more specific, problem this shows is how our criminal legal system tries very hard to decontextualize all events. The question of why Kyle Rittenhouse shot people at a protest is OBVIOUSLY unrelated to how he feels about protesters, our system says, it can only be related to the specific moment he held pulled the trigger, and not when he bought the gun (knowing he wanted to shoot protestors) and decided to drive to the protest (knowing he wanted to shoot protestors) and when he decided to leave the fascist militia side and go start interacting with protestors (when he knew he wanted to shoot protestors). It's only that last moment, when he starts shooting, that matters.

And if you will permit me to be conspiratorially socialist for a bit, I think this lack of context is essential to the system, because an acknowledgment of context would tell us far too much about how to actually avoid "crimes" by meeting people's basic needs and creating systems of support, and would interfere with the real work of the criminal legal system, subjugating the underclasses. (Not to say that specifically Kyle Rittenhouse wouldn't have shot some people, although if we had a system like that, probably there wouldn't need to be BLM protests and Jacob Blake would be alive, so if he did it would be in some completely different situation.)

[Thaluikhain]

Sounds not a million miles away from labelling people as lone wolfs, and not part of a pattern.

[PseudoStupidity]

Minor point, because the problem is that he was shot and not the results of the shooting, but Jacob Blake is alive (he was paralyzed).

The decontextualization of everything in the legal system is so strange. It makes sense once you consider that it's made to protect people (wealthy ones) who can obfuscate their criminal actions with a dozen steps to make stuff technically legal. Like all the crap they do to ensure their companies, and themselves, are taxed at ridiculously low rates (if they're even taxed at all). Or how they can repeat a lie with a violent call to action a million times and then somehow not be inciting violence when a crowd actually responds to the call to action.

[Bigdy McKen]

Ah. So your cool plan is to keep calling me a nazi. No reason to continue talking then.

Ah. So your cool plan is to conveniently ignore all the cogent arguments made, and instead play the martyr.