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| credit: Ohman, Sacremento Bee |
It is enough to make you want to quit the legal profession. Three things wrong with the Rittenhouse trial: 1) the judge was clearly biased in favor of the defendant (besides berating the district attorney on camera, he tossed out the misdemeanor illegal gun charge on a technicality; 2) the prosecution made a strategic mistake by charging Rittenhouse with first degree murder; 3) the self-defense privilege as understood in the common law is outmoded given the reality of widespread gun culture in the US. Only one of the three Rittenhouse "victims" was armed with a gun. (Gage Grosskreutz, who survived). Rittenhouse's homicides were not all excusable since he deliberately placed himself in a situation where resorting to deadly force was a foreseeable result--why else cross state lines armed with a war weapon he was not legally entitled to purchase? (an older friend purchased it for him) In other words, he went looking for trouble, locked and loaded. He found it in Kenosha, WI.