Two trials, two distinctly different cases
Death is not political. It doesn’t distinguish between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, capitalists and communists. It comes for all of us, and our inert bodies emptied of spirit end up in the same dank earth, side by side for an eternity of bones.
I was thinking exactly this as I switched between the two most high-profile criminal trials of the moment: Kyle Rittenhouse in Wisconsin and Ahmad Arbery in Georgia. My reaction to both cases is consistent with my sense of justice, but likely puts me in a no man’s land when it comes to tribal loyalty. I hope you’re keeping me company in the demilitarized zone.
In the case of Rittenhouse, I am convinced of his legal and moral innocence. He is an 18-yearold boy who made tragic errors in judgment and should not have been walking through streets filled with rioters armed with a rifle, but he does not deserve to be convicted of murder. He was the unwitting prey of anarchists, nihilists and in one case, a convicted pedophile. The fact that he shot three men, two of whom died, is regrettable. But we have laws that enshrine the most fundamental of human rights: the instinct for self-defense. If we lose the ability to fight for our own survival, we are nothing more than slaves to hostile strangers.
Kyle Rittenhouse did not stalk the men he shot. They stalked him. They threatened him. They moved on him, against a backdrop of flaming buildings, neutered police officers and screaming anarchists. Only people with a political agenda or a cartoonish understanding of the law culled from a Lifetime movie would believe that he is guilty of homicide.
If he is convicted, it cannot be because of logical assumptions rooted in the law applied to the facts. It will be in defiance of those things, captured on video and echoed in the testimony of prosecution witnesses who made the case for the defense even better than the defense attorneys themselves. No, it will be because of political assumptions, rooted in the idea that whiteness conveys privilege, privilege makes its own laws, and Rittenhouse was guilty the moment he marched into Kenosha.
But then we have the case of Ahmad Arbery, who was stalked, filmed, and shot to death by two men who, unlike Rittenhouse, have no claim to self-defense. They were the aggressors, tracking an unarmed man as if he were an animal on the first day of hunting season, thinking of themselves as avenging angels for imagined crimes.
It is very difficult for me to watch the Arbery trial. The prosecution has such an easy case, given the fact that a young man paid for, at most, trespass on vacant property with his life. This is not a castle doctrine situation where someone was defending their (or someone else’s) property against a dangerous intruder in the middle of the night. There was no parity, no balance between the parties. It was two men against one, armed men against a man with nothing in his hands, aggressors in a vehicle against a man jogging on the street. As with the Rittenhouse case, anyone who finds justification in the shooting of Arbery is motivated by politics, a strange mixture of gun rights, a skewed conception of legitimate law enforcement and race.
Whereas race was irrelevant in the Rittenhouse case, it is so obviously a part of the Arbery case. You only need to consider the hostility that defense counsel is showing to the Black ministers present in the courtroom,
as if they were working some strange spiritual magic on the jury. As a loyal Catholic, I have to wonder if they’d be as angry if Irish priests who looked like Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy showed up in the seats.
And yet, they try and make the victim the villain. “But, but” they say, “Arbery tried to wrestle the gun from his attackers hands!” Irrelevant. He was defending himself against these self-appointed protectors of empty houses, property vigilantes. I cannot recognize as just a legal system that would acquit them.
My position on these two cases puts me at odds with
so many people, those on the left who think Kyle Rittenhouse should be locked away for decades as a MAGA thug, and those on the right who excuse Ahmad Aubrey’s death because they’re reluctant to give an inch on the Second Amendment by admitting that valuing property over human life is diabolical.
The way we react to these trials is a societal Rohrshack test, giving us a fairly accurate view of our separate biases. If we support BLM we hate Kyle Rittenhouse. If we think that Black men are suspicious even in the most innocuous situations, we embrace the men who stalked
and shot Ahmad Arbery. We may not like what they did, but we excuse it because we can empathize with them.
I don’t hate Kyle Rittenhouse and I don’t empathize with Ahmaud’s killers. I hope that there is a healthy number of people who are with me, on this fragile island of sanity surrounded by shark infested waters, we who do not base our concept of justice on what’s best for our natural tribes but rather on what our conscience compels.