Kyle Rittenhouse Verdict
The jury returned a not guilty verdict yesterday in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Rittenhouse was accused of murder after he took a loaded AR-15 rifle into an area of Kenosha, WI in August of 2020 that was filled with protesters in the wake of the George Floyd killing. He shot three people, two of whom died, before the evening was done.
At first blush, the verdict may seem incongruous with the fact Rittenhouse went to Kenosha armed with a rifle seemingly looking for trouble. You or your students might wonder how the jury could have acquitted Rittenhouse given those facts. The verdict is consistent with Wisconsin law, however. The result points to how difficult it is in some cases for prosecutors to win cases where a defendant claims self-defense.
Self-defense is an affirmative defense. It allows a person to justify his actions even though he has committed an act which would otherwise qualify as a criminal act–in this case, killing someone. This means that assuming the prosecution proves all the elements of the crime, the defendant is excused from criminal liability because he was trying to defend himself or others from harm. The way self-defense works is that the defendant has to first come up with some evidence that his defensive actions were warranted. If he does so, then the prosecution has to disprove self-defense beyond a reasonable doubt, along with all the other elements of the criminal offense.
Under Wisconsin law, a person is entitled to use deadly force in self-defense only where he “reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself.” Wisconsin does not have a stand your ground law like Florida which you might remember from the George Zimmerman case. A person cannot claim self-defense if they engage in “unlawful conduct” that is likely to provoke others to attack him. This essentially means that if you start the bar fight, you can’t claim self-defense when you hit the other guy over the head with a bar stool because he was getting the the better of it to that point in the fight. There is one exception, however. Where the instigator reasonably believes that he or she is in “imminent danger of death or great bodily harm,” he can use self-defense to avoid such harm.
So let’s go back to the bar fight. The person can’t normally claim self-defense if they start the fight. But now let’s assume the person who is provoked pulls a gun on the instigator. The instigator would now be entitled to use deadly force to defend himself. This was essentially Rittenhouse’s argument. Although he may have provoked the situation by bringing an AR-15 rifle to an area rife with angry protesters, court testimony showed that Rittenhouse was chased by several angry protesters, fired at by at least one individual, and hit on the head with a skateboard by another. Thus, he was justified, at least in his mind, in shooting his attackers.
All of this begs the question why Rittenhouse was in the area in the first place, armed with a rifle. He lived thirty minutes away in Illinois, just across the border from Wisconsin. He came to Kenosha to defend businesses he believed were being looted and destroyed by protesters. Rittenhouse was a police supporter and had made several social media posts endorsing the police. Since he was too young to buy a rifle legally, Rittenhouse had obtained the AR-15 rifle from a friend (the illegal gun charge was dismissed by the judge). Initially, he had gone to a car dealership where several cars had been burned the night before by protesters. He then left that dealership and was eventually chased by a group into the parking lot of another dealership where the chaos ensued.
A good question to debate with your students is whether Rittenhouse’s actions were morally correct, regardless of whether his actions were ultimately proven to be legal. Should armed vigilantes be allowed to defend the community even when they are not requested to do so? Should we leave the job of defending businesses up to the police and/or the business owners who can hire professional security guards for that purpose?
