16 Time December 6/December 13, 2021
GOOD QUESTION
How do self-defense claims like
Kyle Rittenhouse’s really work?When jurors in Kyle riTTenhouse’s
murder trial began deliberating on Nov. 16,
they weren’t just faced with opposing ver-
sions of events. They had to put themselves
in the teenager’s mindset and decide if he
had reason to believe he was in a kill-or-be-
killed situation when he shot three people
during a night of unrest in Kenosha, Wis.,
on Aug. 25, 2020. “I did what I had to do,”
Rittenhouse, now 18, told the court during
his testimony.
That claim was the crux of his defense,
and the jurors accepted it. They acquitted
Rittenhouse of all charges on Nov. 19, after
deliberating for more than three days. He
broke down in tears and collapsed after he
heard the verdict. He had been facing life in
prison if found guilty on the most serious
charge, first-degree
intentional homicide.
Rittenhouse, then 17,
had traveled from Illi-
nois to Kenosha, where
protests arising from
the police shooting of
Jacob Blake were rag-
ing. Before the night
was out, he shot dead
Anthony Huber, 26, and
Joseph Rosenbaum, 36,
and injured Gaige
Grosskreutz, 27.
During two weeks of
testimony, defense attorney Mark Richards
claimed that Rittenhouse was justified and
that he “didn’t shoot at anyone until he was
chased and cornered.” Prosecutors said
none of the men whom Rittenhouse shot
posed imminent threats. Instead, they said
Rittenhouse lost the right to claim self-
defense because he provoked the attacks and
created his own danger when he brought a
semi automatic rifle to the protests.It can be challengIng to hang a case on
self-defense when few agree on what really
happened. Throw in a chaotic situation on
the ground, a passionate political atmo-
sphere and the specific wording of state
law, and the jury’s job becomes far more
complicated, say attorneys who’ve argued
self-defense cases. But in interviews before
the verdict, experts said the Rittenhousetrial shed light on the difficulty of even de-
fining what self-defense means.
Aside from capital punishment, the only
way to legally kill someone in the U.S. is in
self-defense, but what that means can vary
state by state. It’s typically easier to win self-
defense cases in the roughly 30 states that
have “Stand your ground” laws, which allow
deadly force for protection when reasonable,
says Joseph Tully, an attorney who has won
several self-defense cases. But other states
have more specific requirements. In Wiscon-
sin, a person is permitted to use deadly force
in self-defense if the threat he or she is fac-
ing is equally deadly, says Michael O’Hear, a
law professor in Wisconsin. That means the
jurors agreed that Rittenhouse believed he
faced a lethal threat, and that his belief was
reasonable. Wiscon-
sin’s law also discounts
self-defense if a defen-
dant is found to have
provoked the violence.
That’s what prosecutors
said Rittenhouse did, by
showing up to a protest
with a semiautomatic
rifle. The jury was con-
vinced otherwise.
The Rittenhouse trial
was the first major race-
related case to reach
a jury since former
Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin
was convicted in April of murdering George
Floyd. Rittenhouse and the men he shot
are white, but racial-injustice protests
brought them together that night after
a white Kenosha police officer had shot
Blake, a Black man, two days earlier. Such
circumstances can sway jurors, Tully
says. “The political factors are the biggest
factors,” he says.
Self-defense cases are hard to argue
because, in the end, someone is dead,
and that can be tough to justify, says
Mark O’Mara, the attorney who invoked
self-defense to win acquittal for George
Zimmerman in the 2012 fatal shooting of
Trayvon Martin. “You have intentionally
decided,” O’Mara says of defendants in such
matters, “to take another human life.”
—melissa ChanNEWS TICKER
the
first known person to
contract COVID-1,
manatees have died in
Florida as of Nov. 12—scrap
three controversial
reforms deregulating
the agricultural sector,Rittenhouse listens as a jury pronounces
him not guilty of all charges