Damn the laws that acquit Rittenhouse
This may be old hat to legal experts, but by God, it is disillusioning to be reminded over and over again that the justice system is truly blind — to the carriage of justice, privileging flawed laws over universal truths.
Therefore pardon me for thinking this, but who gives a damn about the law when law keepers can kill and maim with abandon? When laws allow murder and corrupt the idea of “justice” in the process? How do we evaluate a society that is quick to stand in judgment of those protesting such lawmakers, but remains listless about the senseless brutality that brings them out on the streets in the first place? A society more easily horrified by the destruction of property than the maiming of its own soul?
Kyle Rittenhouse was 17 years old when he shot and killed two men and wounded a third with a semiautomatic rifle during protests for Black lives in Kenosha, Wis., in August 2020. On Friday, the now 18year-old was found not guilty of five charges in those killings, including homicide and attempted homicide.
Eighteen years old. Barely an adult, right? A compassionate society would seek rehabilitative justice rather than purely punitive on one so young.
Yet, let’s also consider this. Rittenhouse, then 17, carries a semi-automatic rifle, kills two men, wounds a third, walks towards a police car in the ensuing chaos as he keeps touching his gun, apparently to surrender — and gets pepper sprayed by police.
Tamir Rice, 12. Just 12 years old in 2014, playing with a toy gun, on a quiet playground in Cleveland, Ohio, when he is gunned down by police for possibly being a threat. The cop who killed him, never charged. The boy’s apparent guilt: being Black.
Trayvon Martin was 17 in 2012, killed for the crime of wearing a hoodie and carrying a packet of Skittles in Florida. George Zimmerman, the man who killed him, claimed self-defence and was acquitted.
Mark Hughes, a 34-year-old Black man in 2015, shows up wearing a legally purchased AR-15 rifle at a protest in Dallas in the open carry state of Texas. The protest turns deadly leaving five police officers dead. Hughes quickly hands over his weapon to police and helps them evacuate people from rally, but the Dallas police department still circulates his photo to the world naming him the chief suspect.
While Hughes faced thousands of death threats, Rittenhouse quickly became an “all-American” vigilante hero to the right wing.
Are we supposed to care about which particular set of laws in which particular state allows fully armed people to claim self-defence against unarmed people? Are we supposed to be mollified that an acquittal most unjust was simply the law proceeding as decreed? Are we supposed to be blind to the knowledge that such laws, including the basic presumption of innocence, are never applied equally?
Apparently we are. U.S. President Joe Biden said “the jury system works, and we have to abide by it.”
Rittenhouse arrived in Kenosha to help protect an auto dealership at the invitation of the owner. He walked into a smouldering tinderbox of a situation with a dangerous weapon he had no business carrying and one that immediately made him threatening. And when people around him responded to him like the threat he was, he reacted to that fear with his own. And claimed he responded in self-defence.
As the parents of Anthony Huber, one of Rittenhouse’s victims, said, the not-guilty verdict “sends the unacceptable message that armed civilians can show up in any town, incite violence, and then use the danger they have created to justify shooting people in the street.”
Of course, the presiding judge would throw me out of court for using the word “victim” to refer to one of the men Rittenhouse killed. Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum could be called “rioters” and “looters,” but not “victims,” said Bruce E. Schroeder. The bias from the bench in this very public trial gave us a heads up — accurately it turns out — of what justice would look like in this court with its mostly white jury.
Closer to home, it was an all-white jury that in 2018 acquitted Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley, who shot and killed Colten Boushie, after the 22-year-old Cree man and his friends from the Red Pheasant First Nation drove onto Stanley’s rural property in 2016.
We live in times where taking a human’s life in exchange for a threat to one’s property is given the all-clear — if the killer is white.
The case divided the country then, with Canadians donating thousands of dollars to rival defence funds. But it thankfully also led to a change in the jury selection process to improve racial representation.
A mostly white jury in another high-profile trial is expected to begin deliberations on Monday. That is the case of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man who was chased through a Georgia neighbourhood by three white men and shot at close range, after which one of the men uttered a racial slur. They said they were attempting a “citizen’s arrest” because they assumed the morning jogger was a burglary suspect.
But even a guilty finding in that trial is unlikely to make a dent in the overall injustice of racism. Not at this point in time when historically poisoned race relations are exposing a justice system as being beyond reform.