BREAKING NEWS: Kenosha Shooting Suspect Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17 Year-Old Illinois Resident Who Was in Wisconsin Carrying An AR-15-Style Weapon for Some Reason, Has Been Arrested in Illinois and Is Charged With First-Degree Intentional Homicide in Wisconsin thedailybeast.com/kyle-rittenhou…
PS/ I understand this incident has bred a lot of armchair CJS experts—especially on self-defense—but as someone who's tried homicide cases to acquittal I'll tell you that the videos out there are very bad for Rittenhouse and self-defense doesn't work as the armchair experts think
PS2/ The videos suggest—and by now I've seen dozens, including different events in the timeline from different angles—that someone who looks just like Rittenhouse tried to escape unarmed civilian apprehension after killing a man by shooting several people trying to apprehend him
PS3/ Self-deputizing oneself to "defend" third-party property—or apprehending physical contact by ear/eyewitnesses to murder seeking to detain you until police arrive—isn't going to be a "self-defense" case this man's public defender or private defense attorney plausibly explores
PS4/ The video of someone who looks and is dressed just like Rittenhouse running from a homicide and saying on his cell either "I just killed somebody" or "I just shot someone" is going to confirm he was in flight from a homicide at the time armchair experts claim "self-defense"
PS5/ There is also no *current* evidence (at least from the videos of the event, though we'll see if more emerges) that Rittenhouse apprehended he would shortly experience deadly force from those civilians attempting to apprehend him for the homicide he was then running away from
PS6/ What jurors who watch the "aftermath" videos are likely to see is a 17 year-old who believes he just "killed somebody" deciding irrationally—not qualifying under the "reasonable person" standard—that someone was about to kill him in response, and so opening fire on civilians
PS7/ Jurors may feel Rittenhouse was experiencing "fear" after falling on his back, but that's a separate query from if his fear was reasonable, what the fear was of, and what the fear entitled him to do, especially given other videos establishing his intent on the night at issue
PS8/ I also urge people bending over backwards to find a justification for Rittenhouse to *ask* themselves—even if only in a mirror in private—if they'd be making the exact same arguments if this were a Black 17 year-old from the Bronx instead of a white 17 year-old from Antioch
PS9/ We're supposed to have one system of justice in America, and that system of justice cares about how you acted during an incident, not your political views about protesters or rioters or property damage occurring out-of-state in events having nothing to do with you whatsoever
PS10/ In a healthy democracy Americans would be expressing fact-/data-based opinions on the *actual* prevalence of crime and different types of crime—not cribbing notes from a ranting orange madman—and hold *separate* from that analysis their review of any *one* new incident /end
