JUSTICE BUILDING BLOG

WELCOME TO THE OFFICIAL RICHARD E GERSTEIN JUSTICE BUILDING BLOG. THIS BLOG IS DEDICATED TO JUSTICE BUILDING RUMOR, HUMOR, AND A DISCUSSION ABOUT AND BETWEEN THE JUDGES, LAWYERS AND THE DEDICATED SUPPORT STAFF, CLERKS, COURT REPORTERS, AND CORRECTIONAL OFFICERS WHO LABOR IN THE WORLD OF MIAMI'S CRIMINAL JUSTICE. POST YOUR COMMENTS, OR SEND RUMPOLE A PRIVATE EMAIL AT HOWARDROARK21@GMAIL.COM. Winner of the prestigious Cushing Left Anterior Descending Artery Award.

Thursday, November 18, 2021

RITTENHOUSE VERDICT TODAY?

 Day three of jury deliberations in the Wisconsin Kyle Rittenhouse murder trial. This has been a fascinating case. The Judge is a real character, known as tough on the prosecution during trial, and for handing out tough sentences. 

The defendant is an enigma. He has a baby face. And yet he ran into a nasty mob situation that was not his community, with an AR17 as a seventeen year old. From the spectacular defense we have seen, it does appear he was threatened by the people he shot. And yet...he shot three people and killed two. It would seem to us that a complete acquittal would be hard for any jury to do. But murder charges seem  inappropriate. 

The latest issue is what we in Florida would call a discovery violation necessitating a Richardson hearing. The prosecution introduced a drone video that shows Rittenhouse chasing one of the deceased before shooting him. The prosecution did disclose the video, but not a more prejudicial high-def version that the defense did not see until two days before closing. Another motion for mistrial was filed. 

Meanwhile Wisconsin has a policy of picking the regular and alternate jurors from a barrel that has all the jurors names in it, after closings. And the Judge in this case has had a policy of letting the defendant pluck the names instead of a clerk. Just another quirk from a common sense, but quirky judge, who told everyone that he thinks defendants feel better when they have a measure of control over their case. 

Today is Thursday. Remember Rumpole's first rule of trials: AVOID FRIDAY VERDICTS!

We will be monitoring the case throughout the day as we pound out motions and appellate briefs. 

Thank you for all the (mostly) kind blog birthday wishes. And the cake was totally unnecessary but delicious. 

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

"And yet he ran into a nasty mob situation that was not his community, with an AR17 as a seventeen year old"

Were all the BLM protesters who were there that night confirmed and certified as legal residents of Kenosha?

He lived 20 miles from Kenosha in Antioch, Ill., with his mother and sisters. But his father, grandmother, aunt, uncle, cousins and best friend live in Kenosha. He had a job as a lifeguard in Kenosha and worked a shift on Aug. 25 before helping clean graffiti left by rioters at a local school. There, he and his friend were invited to join other adults who had been asked by the owners of a used car lot in Kenosha to guard the property after 100 cars had been torched the previous night, when police abandoned the town to rioters. Kyle took his gun to protect himself, since the rioters were violent and armed, including, for instance, Antifa medic Gaige Grosskreutz, who lunged at him with a loaded Glock pointed at his head before he was shot in the arm.

https://nypost.com/2021/11/17/10-debunked-heinous-lies-about-kyle-rittenhouse-devine/

Anonymous said...

Def closing sucked, but the argument can be boiled down to what they should have argued:

1. Self defense is absolute. Find it, and youre done deliberating

2. Self defense is a response to a reasonable fear of death/GBI

3. When Rosenbaum told him "Ill rip your heart out" and "Ill kill you", then chased him down to arm's length, Kyle had a reasonable fear of GBI

4. When Huber chased him from behind and hit him in the head two times with skateboard, Kyle had reasonable fear of GBI

5. When Gage pointed his firearm at Kyle's head, Kyle had reasonable fear of GBI

6. It all happened in the context of a riot, with dumpsters on fire and random gunfire in the air. Reasonable fear of death/GBI was *eminently* reasonable.

7. That's it. That's the case. No amount of NBC reporters trailing the jurors or fear of riots or liberal dismay and doxxing should shake this jury. Each person shot caused the defendant to have a reasonable fear of GBI. The defendant provoked none of them.

Anything other than a NG is a travesty

Anonymous said...

And no verdict today either.

Anonymous said...

"with an AR17 as a seventeen year old"

Pretty sure it was an AR-15, not an AR17.

Did you mistakenly type his age (which was 17 at the time) in place of the gun model number?

Anonymous said...

Replying to 4:37:00
I like your argument, simple to understand, and direct as to the facts. You should be sitting at the defense table.

Anonymous said...

Both sides were poor tbh..Kyle should hope for a hung jury this time and hire a much better lawyer next time and he'll be acquitted. The facts are in his favor but he needed a good lawyer to drive it home clearly like 437 did.

Anonymous said...

Still it’s interesting that in this atmosphere of looting and pillaging the only person doing killing is Rittenhouse.

Anonymous said...

I guess the response to 4:37 is, no one who goes armed into a riot without good cause (for example, your mom is trapped in the family shop and you need to go get her out of there) is actually acting in self defense. They went looking for a fight, found a fight, and now can't claim that they were innocently defending themselves.

This is analogous to Zimmerman/Martin. Zimmerman got away with murder and we should be ashamed of ourselves as a society.

From what I understand of the Rittenhouse case (which I admit that I have not followed closely), it is a closer call in favor of self defense than Zimmerman. But I am not sure by how much. At least for Rittenhouse, there was actual shit going down (unlike Zimmerman who just attacked a random kid who had the right to be there, killed him, and them shamefully claimed self defense).

4:37 seems to be arguing in a vacuum like if Rittenhouse was peacefully minding his own business (as opposed to charging into a violent riot with an AK47) and the weapon just materialized in his hands, like a video game, after he was randomly attacked. In essence, 4:37 is arguing that vigilantism is lawful/self-defense.

We'll see how it goes.

Anonymous said...

Not guilty on all counts. We could dissect this case forever but IMHO the case was over charged. It would have been a slam dunk 2 counts of manslaughter. The technicality of not illegally possessing a firearm was a joke at age 17. The statute was clearly intended for hunting rifles. No one intended for it to be illegal for a 17 year old to have an illegal hand gun yet allowed to have an assault style rifle. When that law was written clearly it was not foreseen the popularity of assault style rifles in the general public. Biggest failure was almost ignoring the victim's families in this case. No media interviews yet they were all over the defendant. Just really sad.

Anonymous said...

NOT GUILTY ALL COUNTS!

Anonymous said...

"Biggest failure was almost ignoring the victim's families in this case. No media interviews yet they were all over the defendant. Just really sad."

Some relatives or girlfriends or ex-girlfriends were in court or spoke to the media.

https://nypost.com/2021/11/19/ex-of-man-killed-by-kyle-rittenhouse-says-shed-tell-shooter-hes-a-coward/

https://nypost.com/2021/11/18/anthony-hubers-girlfriend-has-a-lot-of-sympathy-for-kyle-rittenhouse/

They tried doing sympathetic portraits of the "victims" in the mainstream press. But even then, you could tell these people had problems and did not have happy and supportive relationships with their families. Maybe that's why their families were not eager to appear openly or be conspicuous.

Joseph Rosenbaum — depressed, homeless and alone — didn’t belong to either side. He had spent most of his adult life in prison for sexual conduct with children when he was 18 and struggled with bipolar disorder. That day, Aug. 25, Rosenbaum was discharged from a Milwaukee hospital following his second suicide attempt in as many months and dumped on the streets of Kenosha.
...
The weeks leading up to Rosenbaum’s death had been as chaotic as his life. Raised in Texas and Arizona, Rosenbaum met his father only twice and told his mother that he was molested by his alcoholic stepfather “on an almost daily basis,” according to court documents.

When he was 13 his mother was sent to prison for two years, and Rosenbaum was sent off to a group home, where he began using heroin and methamphetamine, according to court documents. By 18, he was in prison for sexual conduct with five preteen boys, the children of people who had taken him in after his mother told him to leave her house, according to a presentencing report. He spent most of the next 14 years behind bars.

Not long after he was released in 2016, he met a woman in Arizona and fathered a child, but the relationship didn’t last. When the woman fled to Kenosha, Rosenbaum chased her.

...

Huber said his mother was a hoarder, according to Gittings and Huber’s friends. The layers of garbage and cat feces that accumulated in the house had been a source of constant stress for Huber, who also was battling a bipolar disorder that went undiagnosed until he was an adult.

In 2012, Huber brandished a butcher knife and threatened to “gut” his brother “like a pig” if he didn’t clean the house. The family told police that Huber choked his brother with his hands for 10 seconds before letting him go and retreating to the skate park. Convicted of strangulation and false imprisonment, he was placed on probation but violated the terms and was sent to prison in 2017. When he came home, he got into another argument over the state of the house. This time, he kicked his sister, and went back to prison on a charge of disorderly conduct in 2018.

Huber’s mother declined to comment for this story, but Huber’s family issued a statement describing him as a hero.

Upon release from his second prison stint, Huber met Gittings at The Port, a Kenosha bar. He told her he was seven years sober from heroin, the same drug Gittings had recently decided to quit. As an alternative to shooting up, he offered a hit from his vape pen loaded with DMT, a psychedelic.

“He had just gotten out of prison and was having a hard time finding a job that doesn’t make you want to f---ing kill yourself every day,” Gittings said. She was coming off the breakup of her marriage. Both were on the verge of homelessness, sleeping on friends’ couches.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/03/kenosha-shooting-victims/