[Defense attorney] Richards reportedly said it is “preposterous” that the FBI allegedly lost the footage. Thomas Binger, the lead prosecutor, then told [Judge] Schroeder in regard to the FBI’s plane footage, that “the federal government is not under our control.”
Boy, that’s the truth.
11 comments:
To be fair, they probably didn't realize it was important. It was just routine surveillance, and they had no way of knowing that the situation in that part of Minneapolis was newsworthy, or that protestors had been shot by enemy forces. If only there had been some news coverage.
It is interesting that somebody 'lost' the footage that might have clarified the actions of Rosenbaum and Rittenhouse but kept the low-res stuff that could be subject to interpretation. According to Andrew Branca at LegalInsurrection (who got a copy of the video played in court from Jack Prosobiec since the video wasn't broadcast as part of the live trial coverage), the prosecution didn't even use the FBI footage uninterrupted but composited it with other ground level video in a way that Branca felt was difficult to understand. However, in his opinion even the low-res footage shows the essential details that Rosenbaum ambushed Rittenhouse as he passed a car lot on his way from the location of the first shooting to the police line.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/11/live-kyle-rittenhouse-trial-day-2/
It's easier to believe in accidents and simple mistakes when they are less common.
Makes a body wonder what kinds of surveillance there might be in some of the other riots over the past year. The ones that cost into the billions because of violence, looting, arson, etc. I wonder if any insurance companies are looking off into the distance, thinking that revelation over.....
Speaking of how common: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/11/04/rittenhouse-defense-suggests-kenosha-da-colluded-with-detective-to-hide-cell-phone-evidence-taken-by-wounded-man-n1529734
Lost all the apollo original recordings data schematics too.
Kenosha is a very small town. The Mayor has cousins in the cop shop, the DA's office, and a few other spots in city or county government. The Mayor is an incompetent hack who froze when the riots broke out. He had NO idea what to do, so he did nothing.
Meantime, you'll note that an ADA is prosecuting the case. That's because the DA--who loves the spotlight in hi-viz cases--doesn't want to be the loser here.
Finally--do you really think that the FEEBS "lost" the hi-res video, given the amount of prosecutable criminal damage to property and the deaths here?
REALLY?
I remain worried that the jury pool is hopeless, but in the first four days of the state's case, we could be forgiven for mistaking the prosecuting attorney for the defense. His witnesses keep resisting his attempts to lead them and stubbornly blurting out facts supporting the self-defense theory. The prosecutor tries to bully a reporter into saying there's no way to know whether one of the dead men really "meant" to grab Rittenhouse's gun, and the witness snaps, "Well, he yelled f*** you and lunged for the barrel." So there's that. Earlier the prosecutor tried to get the same witness to say the deceased was "falling" when shot, as if he'd been executed while helpless. Well, said the witness, he lunged for the gun, and then Rittenhouse shot him, and that's when he fell.
The prosecutor wants to introduce legally irrelevant evidence that one of the dead men once rushed into danger to protect his family years ago. Why? Who knows, apparently he thinks he can argue that the deceased's motives for grabbing the gun were pure, and that will be legally relevant to whether Rittenhouse was reasonably in fear for his life when some guy who's been chasing and threatening to kill him tries to grab his gun. In a side-bar, the judge has to explain to the prosecutor that, if wants that testimony in, he's going to have to listen to the defense elicit testimony about the deceased's history of death threats to his family. The prosecutor wisely retreats: let's just skip the whole line of questioning.
The prosecutor wants to exclude evidence that the second dead man had recently been arrested for domestic violence and had been released from a psychiatric hospital on the very day he was killed. How does he protect the jury from this damaging information? He starts off OK; the defense doesn't get to bring this stuff up, because there's no evidence Rittenhouse knew about it at the time, so it's not evidence of his reasonable fear for his life. Not to worry, the prosecutor is happy to open the door: First he elicits testimony on direct that the deceased was still carrying his "bag from the hospital," apparently in order to make him seem frail and sympathetic. Then he elicits testimony from another witness that the deceased took "his pills" that morning. It's not clear what he hoped to gain from this, but the defense knew what to do with it: he wanted to ask the witness on cross what the pills were for. The state argued that she shouldn't be allowed to answer unless she could establish, outside the presence of the jury, that she was familiar with the pills, their purpose, and their effect. She gets on the stand and, boy howdy, does she ever know! She's the patient's emergency contact for medical purposes, and completely up on all the nuts and bolts. He was taking "gabapentin for bi-polar disorder and Seroquel for depression," and shall I go on, Your Honor? So the jury hears about that, too.
Then the prosecutor puts on a another armed guy who had been interacting with the deceased earlier that day, and witnessed him acting belligerently, taunting people to shoot him, making feints at people as if attacking, and tossing out the N-word, just in case tempers weren't already flaring enough. The apparent point of all this was to get the armed guy to admit that he nevertheless wasn't afraid of the deceased, who clearly was unarmed. Hmm, the defense wondered, might you have felt differently if you hadn't been heavily armed, a former Marine, and in a group of armed friends? What if the deceased had threatened to f**-ing kill you if he ever got you alone? Why yes, in those circumstances the witness would have perceived a threat to his life. Oops.
Seriously, what side is the prosecutor on?
If someone has committed a violent felony and is fleeing, is he entitled to claim self-defense if people try violently to keep him from escaping? If not, it would seem that the whole case revolves around that first encounter.
I'm not a lawyer, and haven't been following the trial--but I did see some of the videos.
"Escaping" is irrelevant. The question is 'did he (reasonably) think he was in danger of death or grave bodily harm'?
The answer is "yes."
The rioters who were chasing him were NOT law enforcement, friend.
Also, even if a well-meaning hero in a crowd mistakenly assumes that someone is a violent escaping offender and tries to exert deadly force on him, but is killed when the perceived "escapee" exercises his right of self-defense, it is irrelevant whether the hero is true-blue. The legal standard is whether the guy exercising his right of self-defense reasonably believed he was at imminent risk of death or severe bodily harm. Had a hair-trigger, and blew away Grandma who was only trying to brush lint off your lapel? Not reasonable. Scared to death by jerks who are trying to kill you for no apparent reason when you've done nothing whatsoever that legally qualifies as instigating a confrontation? Reasonable.
In order to undermine the right of self-defense, the state has to show that the person defending himself initiated the confrontation. It doesn't matter whether other people (reasonably or otherwise) jumped to the conclusion that he initiated the confrontation. The standard is judged from his own viewpoint, on the basis of the facts as he was aware of them, and whether he actually did anything to initiate a confrontation. Carrying a gun in the presence of people who wish you weren't there and (by your presence) implicitly disapproving of their riot isn't enough.
Frankly, even if you defend yourself against a guy who turns out to be a thrice-decorated hero cop, your self-defense theory is good as long as you were reasonable in not perceiving that he was a cop. If the cop was in plainclothes and somehow failed to clue you in, that's tragic for the cop, but you're not supposed to go to jail for it. So it doesn't matter that the guys attacking Rittenhouse weren't in fact cops, or even good citizens. It only matters that Rittenhouse had no reason at all to believe they were, and plenty of reason to be terrified they weren't.
Rittenhouse could have stayed home and avoided trouble. That's not relevant to the self-defense analysis. He could also have thrown his weight around, gotten in people's faces, or threatened them. That would be relevant, but he didn't do that. He did the opposite of that. They were enraged or threatened by the concept he represented, not by any reasonable perception of his behavior.
Even if you believe attackers 2 and 3 somehow believed they were in righteous vigilante mode, that's not relevant either. Whether they were wrong or right, if they attack a guy who didn't in fact initiate a confrontation, and they scare him enough to make him defend himself with deadly force, he has a valid self-defense argument. The defense doesn't turn on whether the would-be vigilantes turn out to be massive jerks, only on the facts as Rittenhouse saw them that night.
This is unfamiliar territory for the general public, but luckily for Rittenhouse, the judge understands it very well. The prosecutors probably know better, but they also know that the jury is unfamiliar with the law of self-defense. They know that it's easy to poison the well by suggesting that Rittenhouse simply shouldn't have been there armed in the first place, and that armed conservatives deserve what they get, while progressive rioters and arsonists are just blowing off steam, hey, sorry about your business and your town.
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