#Was kyle rittenhouse found not guilty trial#

A third demonstrator approached with a handgun Rittenhouse shot him in the arm, nearly blowing it off. Another demonstrator whacked him in the neck with the edge of a skateboard and tried to grab his rifle Rittenhouse shot him in the heart.

When Rittenhouse tripped and fell, another man executed a flying kick Rittenhouse fired twice, from the ground, and missed. Here’s a summary of what happened, per The New Yorker:Ī demonstrator ran up behind Rittenhouse and smacked him in the head. Rittenhouse was running away from a group of protesters who were identifying him as the shooter and yelling out things like “Cranium that boy!” and “Get him!” when the second set of encounters happened. Rittenhouse stood over a man administering first aid to Rosenbaum for half a minute, then fled the scene. While the prosecution argued that Rittenhouse provoked the incident by pointing his gun at Rosenbaum during an earlier verbal confrontation, the reason that may not have unraveled the self-defense argument for the jury is that he then chose to run away from Rosenbaum. Doug Kelley, the deputy chief medical examiner in Milwaukee County, testified that there was no conclusive evidence as to whether Rosenbaum was trying to grab Rittenhouse’s gun or swat it away as he closed in on Rittenhouse the moment before he was shot. Rittenhouse said he knew Rosenbaum didn’t have a gun, but he said he heard someone say “Get him” and “Kill him” as he was pursued, and Rosenbaum had previously threatened his life. Rosenbaum - who witnesses said had threatened to kill Rittenhouse - chased Rittenhouse into a parking lot, threw a bag of toiletries at him, and was shot when Rittenhouse wheeled around just 2.5 seconds after hearing a gunshot from behind him. Rittenhouse first used deadly force against Joseph Rosenbaum. And on this front, Rittenhouse - no matter what you think of him as a moral or political actor in a general sense - had a pretty strong case. It was deciding whether at the very moments that he used deadly force could he argue that it was reasonable to believe he was in serious danger of bodily harm or death. What this means is that the jury wasn’t rendering a judgment on whether Rittenhouse should’ve brought a gun with him to Kenosha, whether he had good politics, what precedent his behavior could set, or whether it was appropriate to cosplay a paramedic or a police officer. In this case, Rittenhouse can argue that even if he provoked others to attack him by openly carrying his semi-automatic rifle at a mob scene, he was still able to use deadly force under Wisconsin law because he reasonably believed he had no other alternatives at those moments to avoid death or great bodily harm. What the law taketh away, it giveth back.

Even then, however, the law says a defendant may still use deadly force if he reasonably believes he has no other means to avoid death or great bodily harm. It provides that a “person who engages in unlawful conduct of a type likely to provoke others to attack, and who does provoke an attack, is not allowed to use or threaten force in self-defense against that attack.” That prohibition would seem to apply to Rittenhouse, whose alleged illegal possession of a semi-automatic rifle provoked others to attack him. Generally, someone who provokes an attack is unable to use self-defense, but Wisconsin law is a little more generous, even contradictory. Under that law, deadly force is permitted if a defendant “reasonably believed that the force used was necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself.” Reasonableness is to be viewed based on “the defendant’s position under the circumstances that existed at the time of the alleged offense.” attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.Īs she explained in a column for MSNBC prior to the verdict, that that was a very high bar to meet under Wisconsin’s vaguely worded law:

#Was kyle rittenhouse found not guilty trial#

While our national conversation among liberals often centered on the Rittenhouse trial as a matter of racial justice, the crux of the legal battle was whether the prosecution could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Rittenhouse did not act in self-defense when he fired his shots, according to Barbara McQuade, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and former U.S.