Jury seated for homicide trial of Kyle Rittenhouse
KENOSHA, Wis. — A jury was selected in a single day Monday for the homicide trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the young, aspiring police officer who shot three people while they were out on the streets of Kenosha during a protest against racial injustice last year.
Opening statements are set to begin Tuesday morning.
The jury in the politically charged case must decide whether Rittenhouse acted in self-defense, as his lawyers claim, or was engaged in vigilantism when the 17-year-old opened fire with an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle in August 2020, killing two men and wounding a third.
In an all-day session that ran well past dark, 20 people — 12 jurors and eight alternates — were selected. The judge said he would decide at the end of the trial which ones are alternates and which ones will deliberate. The 20 consist of 11 women and nine men.
Jurors were not asked to identify their race during the selection process, and the court did not immediately provide a racial breakdown of the group.
The seating of a jury moved along rapidly, given the sharp polarization caused by the shootings. About a dozen prospective jurors were dismissed because they had strong opinions about the case or doubts they could be fair.
Rittenhouse had traveled to Kenosha from his home in Illinois during unrest that broke out 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.
The now-18-year-old Rittenhouse faces life in prison if convicted of first-degree homicide, the most serious charge against him.
Rittenhouse has been painted by supporters on the right — including foes of the Black Lives Matter movement — as a patriot who took a stand against lawlessness by demonstrators and exercised his Second Amendment gun rights. Others see him as a vigilante and police wannabe.
He is white, as were those he shot, but many activists see an undercurrent of race in the case, in part because the protesters were on the streets to decry police violence against Black people.
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.
The judge said Rittenhouse’s constitutional right to a fair trial, not the Second Amendment right to bear arms, will come into play, and “I don’t want it to get sidetracked into other issues.”
One of the jurors is a gunowning woman with a high school education who said she was so afraid during the protests that she pulled her cars to the back of her house and made sure her doors were locked. She said she went downtown in the aftermath and cried.
Another woman chosen is a special education teacher who expressed anxiety about being on the jury: “I figure either way this goes you’re going to have half the country upset with you and they react poorly.”
Another juror said he owns a gun and has it for “home defense.”
One juror is a pharmacist who said that she was robbed at gunpoint in 2012 but that it would have no effect on her ability to weigh the evidence in this case.
Among those dismissed were a man who said he was at the site of the protests when “all that happened” and a woman who said she watched a livestream video of the events and wasn’t sure if she could put aside what she saw.