When can you use a gun to defend yourself? A jury in the small Wisconsin city of Kenosha decided on a rather expansive answer when they rendered their verdict in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse
The 18-year-old, who has become a darling of the American right, and whose defence was funded by well-wishers, will go free. Those on the left, including a congresswoman who called Mr Rittenhouse a “domestic terrorist”, and even Joe Biden, who implied he was awill find themselves wondering why 12 ordinary men and women in the courtroom did not agree.
The acquittal could not be predicted, because the trial did not rest on the facts. Most of those were well known long before any witness took the stand. After a night of rioting that followed the shooting by police of a black man, Jacob Blake, Mr Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, travelled to Kenosha to volunteer to defend businesses from looters. He took with him an ar-15 style semi-automatic rifle he had paid a friend, Dominick Black, to purchase for him .
Rather, the case relied on the jury’s assessment of Mr Rittenhouse’s mind at the moment of the shootings.
Earlier in the trial, Bruce Schroeder, the judge, had stressed that the decision was “not a political trial”. Yet in his jury instructions, he also specifically told them to “pay no heed to the opinions of anyone—even the president of the United States or the president before him”. In contrast to Mr Biden’s intervention, Donald Trump had suggested he was only defending himself.
Ultimately, politics is hard to avoid in cases like this, because the law asks a jury to decide what is a “reasonable” use of a gun, says Samuel Buell of Duke University. That is not something most Americans agree on. In the past decade or so, the “open carry” of weapons, particularly to sensitive events such as protests, has burgeoned, led by right-wing
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