The jury is in Kyle RittenhouseThe murder trial on Thursday went on for the third day without a verdict, and the judge barred MSNBC from entering the court after a freelancer on the network was accused of following a juror on a bus.
The team members will return to work on Friday morning. Unlike the previous few days, they did not raise any questions on Thursday, nor did they ask to see any evidence in this political and racially problematic case.
The 18-year-old Rittenhouse was tried for killing two men with a rifle and wounding a third on the night of the riots. Kenosha In the summer of 2020, a black man Jacob Black was shot and killed by a white policeman.
Even if the jury weighs the evidence, the defense’s two requests for mistrials are still pending, and if the team is to convict Rittenhouse, the verdict may be overturned. One of the requests requires the judge to go further and prohibits the prosecutor from retrying him.
Also on Thursday, itinerant Judge Bruce Schroeder banned MSNBC after police said they had briefly detained a man who was following a jury bus and possibly trying to photograph the jurors. The judge said that the man claimed to work for the network.
NBC News said in a statement that the man was a freelancer and received a subpoena for a traffic violation near the jury vehicle. He “never photographed or planned to photograph them.”
Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old former police youth cadet, went to Kenosha. He said it was an effort to protect property after the mob set fire and ransacked the business the other night.
He shot and killed 36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum and 26-year-old Anthony Huber, and wounded 28-year-old Gaige Grosskreutz. Rittenhouse was white, and the people he shot were also white.
Rittenhouse said he took self-defense actions after being attacked, while the prosecutor argued that he incited the bloodshed.
This case exposes the deep differences between Americans on American guns, racial injustice, vigilance, and self-defense.
For some civil rights activists, the shooting was an attack on the racial justice movement, and some complained that the law enforcement agencies treated Rittenhouse that night with racial double standards.
The defense twice asked the judge to declare the trial invalid, claiming that they had obtained a poor quality copy of a potentially vital video, and that the prosecution posed inappropriate questions to Rittenhouse during the cross-examination.
Schroeder has stated that if the verdict is guilty, the application for mistrial must be resolved. If Rittenhouse is acquitted, the dispute will be irrelevant. But if he is found guilty and the judge declares the trial invalid, that basically invalidates the sentence.
If the most serious charges against him are convicted, Rittenhouse could be sentenced to life imprisonment.
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