Tragedy & Hope in the Rittenhouse Trial

Can the media and government succeed in convicting Kyle Rittenhouse after the law and facts have exonerated him? This is now the only question that matters in settling Kyle's fate. Any honest man who knows the law and facts has to concede that he is innocent. Anyone with red blood in his veins has to acknowledge that Kyle is a hero, a young man who showed more physical and moral courage than any public figure of recent memory, a young man whose justified self-defense threw a wrench in the coordinated violence that undoubtedly would have lasted every weekend until Election Day 2020, at least. A sane and just nation would praise Rittenhouse. But because Kyle's heroism flies in the face of the powers that be, the media and government have done all they can to crush him. Thus the Government is pursuing perhaps the weakest criminal case ever to gain national attention, and the media are promoting a bogus narrative which, after considering that the trial is available via livestream to any person who wants to watch, may be the most brazen propaganda campaign they have ever attempted. And they still just might win.

The trial deals with events that were almost all captured on video. The video all tends to show that Kyle Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense on the night of August 25th, when he shot three men all trying to murder him. Because Kyle invoked the right to self-defense, the burden falls on the Government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Kyle was not acting in self-defense. Given the fact that all the evidence tends to show that Kyle was acting in self-defense, and almost none of the evidence tends to show that he wasn't acting in self-defense, the case should never have been brought, and it should not be seen by a jury. In the modern American legal system, juries are triers of fact. But when there are literally no facts to support one side's argument (in this case, the Government's side), the case should be dismissed as a matter of law.

The problem is that there is one piece of evidence supporting the Government's case. It is some drone footage, allegedly taken by the FBI, which according to the Government shows Kyle lifting up his rifle in the moments before a pedophile attacked him, therefore provoking the pedophile's attack and nullifying his claim of self-defense. The drone footage doesn't actually show this; everything is far too blurry to see. The Government even acknowledged this implicitly, because they set to task an oafish detective to blow up the segment of the footage allegedly showing Kyle raising his rifle. The blown-up footage is just as useless, just a blur. It's a rorschach test for whatever you want to see: Rifle or no rifle, guilt or innocence.

That rorschach test is now in evidence for the jury to see. Before, there was absolutely no way the jury could have found Kyle had provoked a fight and negated his claim of self-defense. Now there is.

Any layman watching should wonder, How did the footage come in? Isn't there a safeguard against such garbage evidence being shown to a jury? Any lawyer worth his salt knows there are many ways to keep it out, most obviously from the fact that we know next to nothing about who took the footage, or how the footage has been stored over the past 15 months. This goes to the most basic question when submitting evidence: Is it authentic, i.e. is this evidence what its proponent claims it is? The Government failed to answer, or even attempt to answer, any of these questions. Keeping the footage out of evidence should be a piece of cake.

But the Rittenhouse defense failed to make an objection to the drone footage. The defense did object to the oafish detective's blown-up clips, but by this time it was too late. The judge allowed in the original drone footage, the blown-up images, and two detectives' testimony claiming they saw Kyle raise his rifle in the blurry footage. Any second-year law student could think of easy ways to keep this garbage out of evidence. Instead, the garbage made it in, as did a provocation instruction which gives unscrupulous jurors a semi-legitimate excuse in voting for conviction.

The FBI's presence at the Kenosha riots, and their non-presence at the trial, is interesting to say the least. The drone video should never have come in without, at the very least, calling the FBI operator to the stand. Certain questions follow naturally: Were the FBI agents present that night concerned about how many felons like the pedophile Rosenbaum had crossed state lines to be there? Besides their drones, what other kinds of surveillance did they have? Why did they hold onto the drone footage for so many months without revealing it to the defense and the public? These are all questions a defense lawyer would love to ask. The fact that Kyle could face Federal civil rights charges even if he wins acquittal perhaps explains why the defense has made no attempt to probe into Fed mischief. This speculation is an attempt to defend what is otherwise incompetence on the defense attorneys' part. 

But what is the virtue of criticizing defense counsel in a show trial? Attorneys are justified in basing their decisions on what is necessary to win in a fair trial. There is no doubt, given the facts and law, that the defense deserves to win. But there is no guarantee that this is a fair trial. Nothing can guarantee the jurors will follow a notion of justice prescribed by the courts rather than the justice of the media and the progressive mob.

The Chauvin show trial was a disgrace on many levels, but most of all for how the media narrative seeped into the courtroom through biased witnesses and jurors. In contrast, the reality exposed in the Kenosha courtroom has nothing to do with the media environment outside. The Government can't get a good witness. Everyone at Kenosha that night was either a communist scumbag who would blow up on cross-examination, or was a decent person alarmed by the scumbags who had overrun the town--that is, they were on Kyle's side.  If the jurors are looking at news media this weekend (and who can doubt that they are?), they will be seeing an alternate reality to what they witnessed in the courtroom. Gaige Grosskruetz--the communist scum who is currently trying to extort $10 million from the City of Kenosha, who chased after Kyle as he was fleeing to police protection, who admitted that Kyle didn't shoot him until he had threatened him with a gun of his own and later rued the fact that he failed to murder Kyle--is given sympathetic interviews by Michael Strahan and called a victim. The media usually operate in deception by degree. Now the media can only hope their consumers don't watch forty-second clips of the trial which could blow up their narrative like Gaige Grosskreutz's bicep.

And now the jurors are given a choice: Do they believe the facts stated at trial? Or do they believe the media narrative they have heard all along? The latter will be the standard of judgment everywhere, among their friends and family, and probably in the history books. Because of the provocation instruction, the jurors have a way to semi-justify a verdict of guilty on at least some of the counts. Why not throw a guilty verdict to the great mass of people who are told day by day that Kyle is guilty--to say nothing of the great Arc of History, which will surely approve of the day when Kyle's kind is exterminated from the United States? If the jurors vote to acquit, it is because they looked at the facts. If the jurors vote to convict, it is because they understand the narrative.