Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict A Study In Criminal Law

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for a year, you’ve heard the name Kyle Rittenhouse and likely have an opinion of the young man that fits on either side of two extremes. Either he’s a monster or simply a kid defending himself. As a civilized nation should do, we let the legal system take care of it rather than let it be decided by politicians, talking heads or media drones.

In doesn’t take a world-class legal mind to have seen an acquittal coming. Anyone with a basic understanding of law should have expected that outcome.

To go into it a bit deeper, one only needs to know that there are essentially five elements of self-defense law.

Element 1 – Innocence. Don’t start the fight. You can’t be defending yourself if you are the attacker.

Element 2 – Avoidance. This basically means to run if you can.

Element 3 - Reasonableness. While you don’t have to make a perfect decision, you have to try to make the best one you can under the circumstances.

Element 4 - Imminence. The attack must be in progress or immediately about to occur.

Element 5 - Proportionality. Deadly force can only be used to counter a threat of similar force.

The verdict ensures that the jury saw fit that the defendant did meet these standards. A quick web search will tell you about them in detail.

Early on, most people familiar with the law would have likely said that there were really only two charges that were made against Rittenhouse that could have been seriously considered. That was a misdemeanor weapons charge which carries a maximum penalty of 9 months in jail and curfew breaking charge that is punishable by up to a $200 fine.

When the weapons charge was thrown out by Judge Bruce Schroeder, as one of the lesser charges against him, any reasonable person would be forced to consider that it only makes sense that more serious charges couldn’t possibly hold water.

Two of the major mistakes of the prosecution from the very start were that they overcharged the young man and possibly that they charged him as an adult when he was 17 at the time of the events. In addition, as the proceedings occurred, we learned of several examples of what some might call prosecutorial misconduct regarding holding back evidence, hiding details about the not so innocent victims and so much more.

Perhaps the biggest problem the jury, judge and defense faced was not one within the legal system but outside of it. One can reasonably assume that political pressure and the less than neutral mainstream media along with the possibility of violence following any favorable verdict to Rittenhouse would be a heavy weight for them to carry.

Neither the jury nor the judge abandoned their duties to appease those who essentially added up to a metaphorical angry mod with torches and pitchforks. Sadly, this has happened before (some might say one such case was the original O.J. Simpson trial).

In this country, it used to be a generally agreed upon standard that we accepted the idea of innocent until proven guilty. In fact, that’s what separates us from some countries that run sham trials with a ruling almost pre-planned from the start. However, some in media, politics and activism no do little more than jump to a conclusion within minutes or hours of hearing about something that took place. This is professional malpractice and reckless.

It is good to know that despite the pressure, the system worked the way it was supposed to. And while it may be imperfect, so it anything designed by man. And for all its flaws, I would challenge anyone to say there a better system out there.