Jury selection underway at Kyle Rittenhouse homicide trial
KENOSHA, WIS. >> The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse opened Monday with the challenging task of seating jurors who hadn’t already made up their minds about the young aspiring police officer who shot two people to death and wounded a third during a night of anti-racism protests in Kenosha last year.
The jury that is ultimately selected in the politically charged case will have to decide whether Rittenhouse acted in self-defense, as his lawyers claim, or was engaged in vigilantism when he opened fire with an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle.
By late afternoon, at least 28 of the 150 or so prospective jurors summoned for the trial had been dismissed, about a dozen of them because they had strong opinions about the case or doubts they could be fair. Some also expressed fear about public anger toward the jury but were not immediately dismissed from the case.
Rittenhouse, 18, faces life in prison if convicted of the most serious charge against him, first-degree homicide.
Rittenhouse was 17 when he traveled to Kenosha from his home in Illinois, just across the Wisconsin state line, during unrest that broke out in August 2020 after a white Kenosha police officer shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, in the back. Rittenhouse said he went there to protect property after two previous nights marked by arson, gunfire and the ransacking of businesses.
As jury selection got underway, Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder stressed repeatedly that jurors must decide the case solely on what they hear in the courtroom, and cautioned: “This is not a political trial.”
“It was mentioned by both political campaigns and the presidential campaign last year, in some instances very, very imprudently,” he said.