THE VERDICT

 

The complete acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teen who, in August of last year, shot three people with an AR-15-type semi-automatic rifle—killing two and maiming the third—during racial unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, has further deepened the abyss that divides Americans on the left and right of the political spectrum. It has also played into the divisions between white and black Americans, between democratic liberals and far-right authoritarians, and between gun-rights fundamentalists and those clamoring for stricter gun control in an ever more dangerous society. In the middle are political moderates riding the fence between application of the letter rather than the spirit of the rule of law, forcing themselves to embrace the verdict as “how the law works” because not to do so would be to admit that the American justice system is broken.

'Like all 17-year-olds'?

Indeed, following the verdict handed down on Friday, Washington Post columnist Meagan McArdle tried to portray Rittenhouse as being just like “all seventeen-year-olds (who) act like fools sometimes.” She did, however, have to admit that, in his case, the then-seventeen-year-old was acting like a fool with an assault weapon in his hands. And people died.

McArdle went on to posit that “when on Friday afternoon the jury returned a verdict of not guilty on all counts, it wasn’t yet another triumph of white supremacy, aided by a biased judge. It was the American justice system working as it should: giving the benefit of the doubt to a defendant who was dangerously unwise but didn’t clearly commit murder.” But I’m not at all sure that’s true. It constitutes, I feel, more wishful thinking than a sound argument.

In point of fact, Rittenhouse was never charged with murder, though he was indeed charged with homicide, so this is an oversimplification on the part of McArdle and several other editorial writers who have referred to the case as “a murder trial.” But her views seem to have been reflective of those of much of the rest of the mainstream press, who were being careful not to fall into the same lawless rhetoric used by the right throughout the presidency of Donald Trump, a president who blithely ignored the rule of law and Constitutional guarantees and often urged citizens to take the law into their own hands. So, in this post-Trump era in which there is an effort to renew the country’s democratic institutions—as well as a continuing effort to permanently destroy them—moderates were almost forced to see this as a fair and impartial trial, so as not to call foul against a system that is meant to protect and serve the rule of law and the rights of citizens. It should be noted that this didn’t stop the judge from railing against “the media”, as if it were some dictatorial monolith that was out to get him, or from threatening to have the press and mass media banned from his court.

To my mind, however, McArdle and many of her other colleagues who make their living offering their opinions, are mixing apples and oranges. It would be one thing to conclude from the Rittenhouse trial that the constitutional principle of trial by a jury of one’s peers is flawed. It isn’t and wasn’t in as far as the job carried out by the jurors in this case goes.

Judge Bruce Schroeder

The jury had an extremely tough job. They not only had to decide guilt or innocence in a very public trial, but also had to eschew the influence of those who see the teen as a hero and a good boy with a gun, and those who consider him a cold-blooded killer who wept crocodile tears in the courtroom for the benefit of the media. They further were faced with having to put aside their feelings about race—a jury of eleven white people and only one African-American—because, in the end, the story behind the killings is of a white boy who attended a pro-black demonstration armed with an assault rifle. This, despite Ms. McArdle’s attempt to dismiss him in her editorial as someone who “dove (sic) into the drama of running around with a gun, putting out fires and providing first aid during unrest following a police shooting in Kenosha,” and adding that Rittenhouse “didn’t act like a hunter, or even a belligerent kid trying to provoke a confrontation. When chased, he retreated, turning around only after something was thrown at him, and then again when one of his pursuers fired off his own gun.”

But the jury’s verdict had to be formed within the extremely narrow context of what they were given to work with after the judge presented them with more than thirty pages of instructions. As such, it would have been almost impossible for jurors to hand down any other verdict. But that doesn’t change the fact that there was gross manipulation of the Rittenhouse case to ensure from the outset, that the teen would be acquitted. And the author of that manipulation appears to have been the judge in the case, Bruce Schroeder. At seventy-five, Schroeder is the longest-serving circuit court judge in Wisconsin. He was a Democratic Party nominee and has consistently won elections unopposed since 1983. He is known for being old-school and no-nonsense.

But even if one gives the judge the benefit of the doubt and figures that he was merely trying to ensure that Kyle Rittenhouse got a fair trial, it could clearly be equally argued that his trial offered no justice whatsoever for the two men whom Rittenhouse gunned down. On the contrary, his court’s handling of the case has put blame for the incident squarely on those killed and wounded and completely exonerated the then-minor who took the two lives and endangered a third—that of the only other person in the fray who had a firearm. Nor does it change the fact that Rittenhouse also discharged his weapon in the direction of a fourth (unknown) man while the man was running away, thus further endangering the lives of others taking part in the protest.

Rittenhouse in Kenosha

Given the evidence brought to light during the trial, there are undeniable facts that the public will surely take into account, even if the court didn’t, in deciding whether they think justice has been served in the absolute acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse. For instance, some solid facts of the case are that Rittenhouse went from his home in Illinois to neighboring Wisconsin specifically to go to Kenosha where the riots were taking place. While it has been widely stated that Rittenhouse’s single-mother, Wendy Rittenhouse, drove him to the riots, this is false, nor did her son leave home armed. Kyle took possession of the AR-15-style assault rifle in Kenosha, where a friend had purchased it for him. But at age seventeen, he was indeed in violation of Wisconsin law that only allows minors to possess arms specifically for hunting, not those considered under the law to be “dangerous firearms”—basically, weapons of war—like the AR-15. They can only use those firearms when accompanied by an adult and only for the purpose of target practice.

It is also questionable whether, as Ms. McArdle and other commentators suggest, Rittenhouse was merely carrying the assault rifle “just in case” while selflessly performing humanitarian tasks, like helping “put out fires” or “administering first aid.” This contrived narrative was clearly embraced as well by Judge Schroeder, who, from the outset, refused to allow the prosecution to refer to those whom Rittenhouse slayed and maimed with an illegally-possessed firearm as “victims”. But the judge granted permission to the defense to refer to the three (not) victims as “looters and arsonists”—when there seems to be no specific evidence that they were either. It is hard to see this conduct by the judge as anything but prejudicial to the prosecution, but that will now be for an appellate court to decide, if at all.

(Not) victim Rosenbaum, four slugs

The defense also got away with claiming that the feet and hands of those pursuing him, and a skateboard with which Kyle was swatted, were just as threatening as the assault rifle that the youth was carrying. And there was little stress placed on the fact that the one (not) victim who was also armed only pointed his pistol at Rittenhouse after the boy had already slain one of his two other fatal (not) victims. Nor was the jury pressed to consider that one of Rittenhouse’s two unarmed (not) victims’ bodies bore not one, but four slugs from the assault rifle. In other words, there can be little doubt that Rittenhouse’s aim was not merely to deter but to ensure that he killed that man, Joseph Rosenbaum. According to his girlfriend’s statements, she and Rosenbaum had been homeless and living in a motel. He was taking anti-depressants and had literally just been released from the hospital after a failed suicide attempt, and was carrying a plastic bag filled with personal items.

Rosenbaum was one of perhaps a dozen people pursuing Rittenhouse, who had appointed himself as a sort of vigilante security guard at a car dealership after another dealership had been torched. The defense clarified that Rosenbaum, an ex-convict who had done hard time on a sex charge, only began to pursue Rittenhouse after the teen pointed his weapon at him. At some point in a security video, Rosenbaum is apparently seen to heave the plastic bag with his personal items in it at Kyle and continues to pursue him. It was when Rosenbaum caught up to Rittenhouse that the boy turned and pumped four slugs into him—two in the front, one in the back and another one that grazed Rosenbaum’s head—killing him.

(Not) victim Huber - deceased - took a
skateboard to a gunfight

Rittenhouse’s other fatal (not) victim was twenty-six-year-old Anthony Huber who, seeing Rittenhouse armed with an assault rifle in the crowded street, considered the boy an active shooter. According to Huber’s girlfriend, Anthony pushed her out of the way and ran into harm’s way to try and disarm Rittenhouse. Huber was carrying a skateboard and used it in an attempt to bludgeon the teen, whom he saw as an armed and imminent threat to public safety. He managed to strike Rittenhouse twice before Kyle shot him once. Huber staggered away but then fell dead on the ground. Rittenhouse claims that Huber had grabbed the barrel of his weapon. Forensics experts said they found no evidence of Huber’s DNA on the assault weapon, but added that he might have touched it anyway.

Finally, the other non-fatal (not) victim was Gaige Grosskreutz. Grosskreutz, a paramedic, was at the protest to provide medical care. He had packed his medical supplies as well as his legally-owned handgun. He said that he routinely carried a gun when performing emergency services during violent demonstrations.

(Not) victim Grosskreutz, medic, wounded

Like Huber, Grosskreutz saw Rittenhouse as an active shooter. He heard those chasing Kyle say that he’d shot someone and was getting away. After witnessing how Rittenhouse dropped Huber, Grosskreutz engaged, pointing his weapon at Rittenhouse to try and prevent him from killing anyone else, but Kyle fired as soon as he saw the other man’s pistol and blew away a large portion of Grosskreutz’s bicep.

In all three cases, the (not) victims saw Rittenhouse, with his illegally carried assault weapon, as the aggressor, and yet, the specificity of the judge’s instructions to the jury only permitted them to rule on whether they believed Rittenhouse felt threatened enough to use deadly force—again, with a weapon he had no business carrying, and in a place where he had no business being, since his presence there was in defiance of a government-imposed curfew.

The charges against Rittenhouse were seven:

·      One count of first-degree reckless homicide in the slaying of Rosenbaum. An eyewitness video shows Rosenbaum chasing Rittenhouse through a parking lot and, at one point, throwing a plastic bag at him. Rittenhouse flees behind a car and Rosenbaum follows. Rittenhouse wheels around and, according to eyewitness testimony, Rosenbaum lunged at him. Rittenhouse shot Rosenbaum dead. To my point about this not being a “murder trial”, as McArdle and other editorial writers have alleged, reckless homicide is not the same as intentional homicide. The meaning of that is that Rittenhouse didn’t set out with the intention of murdering Rosenbaum. But, in the end, the result was the same and, according to the charge, showed utter disregard for human life. Reckless homicide carries a maximum sixty-year prison sentence.

·      One count of reckless endangerment in the use of a dangerous weapon. This had to do with testimony from a news reporter who followed Rosenbaum on foot when he was chasing Rittenhouse. The reporter testified that he was right in the line of fire when Rittenhouse opened up on Rosenbaum with the assault rifle and killed the other man. This charge carries a maximum sentence of twelve years and six months in prison. The jury was given the option of convicting Rittenhouse of second-degree reckless endangerment, meaning he hadn’t acted with utter disregard for human life. That would have reduced the jail sentence to ten years.  

·      A second count of reckless endangerment in the use of a dangerous weapon. This was the result of video showing how a fourth, unknown man leaps at Rittenhouse, trying to kick him, as Huber, with his skateboard, approaches the teen. Rittenhouse squeezed off two rounds at the man and missed. The man fled before Huber took Kyle on and was killed. Once again, this charge carries a sentence of ten to twelve-and-a-half years.

·      One count of intentional homicide in the use of a dangerous weapon. This stems from when Rittenhouse was being pursued by Huber and fell. When he turned over and saw Huber approaching, he aimed his assault rifle at the other man. This charge appeared to somewhat establish that Huber only tried to hit Rittenhouse with his skateboard after Kyle took aim at him and just before Rittenhouse gunned Huber down. This too is documented on video. “Intentional homicide” is self-explanatory. It means that one person intentionally kills a homicide victim—in this case, (not) victim Huber. The charge carries a mandatory life sentence. Here too, the jury was given the option of deciding for lesser charges— second-degree intentional homicide or first-degree reckless homicide which carries a maximum sixty-year sentence.

·      One count of attempted first-degree intentional homicide in the use of a dangerous weapon, connected to Rittenhouse’s wounding of Gaige Grosskreutz right after he shot and killed Huber. This charge carries a sixty-year prison term. Again, the jury was also given the option of considering lesser charges—second-degree attempted intentional homicide and first-degree reckless endangerment. The first is punishable by thirty years in prison and the second by twelve years and six months

·      One count of possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under eighteen years of age. Rittenhouse was still only seventeen on the night that he shot the three men with an AR-15-type, .223-caliber semi-automatic assault rifle, a weapon similar in every way to the M-16 carried by US combat personnel starting in the Vietnam War, the only major difference being that the M-16 could be used as a semi-automatic or fully automatic weapon. Under Wisconsin law, as mentioned earlier, minors can only possess guns specifically made for hunting, or when supervised by an adult in target practice or instruction in the proper use of a dangerous weapon. The judge threw this charge out immediately on a technicality raised by the defense. In all of the homicide cases above, the fact that Rittenhouse was in illegal possession of a dangerous firearm could have added five years to any eventual sentence.

·      And finally, one count of failure to comply with an emergency order from state or local government. This had to do with the fact that there was an 8pm curfew in place when Rittenhouse took it upon himself to dispense vigilante street justice that night at a violent demonstration in Kenosha. A misdemeanor, the charge carries a two-hundred-dollar fine. The judge threw the charge out directly.

  

Considering the charges leveled and Kyle Rittenhouse’s incredibly reckless actions, whatever the legal criteria might be that judge and jury applied in letting the boy off scot-free is bound to stick in the craw of everyone who is increasingly alarmed at the level of rampant violence and division existing in American society today. The fact that Rittenhouse did not even have to face sentencing for the lesser charges involved in his possessing an assault rifle illegally—not even a misdemeanor charge for breaking curfew—lets him walk away feeling that his behavior has been vindicated and even condoned.

Rittenhouse - like the t-shirt reads: Free as Fuck

Worse still, the decision can’t help but encourage other white vigilantes—because, let’s not kid ourselves, this would have been a very different trial if the shooter had been black—to take the law into their own hands, a trend that we are seeing more and more frequently (as in the shooting death of African-American jogger Amaud Arbery at the hands of three white Georgia men who tracked him down and killed him, perhaps thinking that if a black guy was running, it must be from something.

The US is fast returning to the Wild West where lawmen dispense “justice” from the barrel of a gun, and any gunslinger with a score to settle does so, not through the judicial system, but taking the law into his own hands. And here I say through the judicial system rather than through the law, because clearly, as this case shows, American law all too often turns the shooter into the “victim” and the deceased into the (not) victim. This to me would appear to suggest that legislators should be looking at authentically justice-based changes in the law.

The simple facts of this case are that Kyle Rittenhouse was not exercising his right to self-defense because arsonists and looters were burning and ransacking his home, or because one of them broke into his house and smacked him with a potentially lethal skateboard. Nor was he quietly sitting on his own front porch minding his own business when another of his (not) victims pointed a gun at him. No. Kyle Rittenhouse left his home, crossed into another state, armed himself with and assault rifle that he had no business possessing and marched recklessly into angry throngs of rioters, playing out some Rambo fantasy that ended up almost getting him killed, but instead, cost the lives of three other people. Three men who, thanks to the decision of a Wisconsin court, have gone from being (not) victims, to being portrayed as victimizers.

In the end, Kyle Rittenhouse simply went to Kenosha looking for trouble. He found it and made it. And he has been handsomely rewarded for his efforts.  

 

I CAN’T BREATHE MEANS I CAN’T BREATHE

Part of the training I received—like thousands of other American boys during the Vietnam era—while doing my basic combat course at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, in 1970,  was hand to hand fighting. The course was based, we were told, on a combination of karate, kick-boxing and street-fighting. Our instructor, who was a one hundred forty-five-pound, five-foot-eight-inch African American Airborne Ranger from Springfield, Ohio, was as fast and skilled as he was small. He was what Mickey Goldmill (the crusty old trainer brilliantly played by Burgess Meredith in the now classic boxing movie Rocky) would have called “a very dangerous individual.”

This sergeant’s job was to train us to use a minimum of blows and force to immobilize and kill our enemy in close-quarter combat. The skills he sought to teach us were based not on knowing how to throw the hardest and most punches, but how to throw the least and most accurate ones, to use our heads as well as our bodies, to strike where we could do the most damage in the least amount of time, since the longer a fight went on, the greater chance we had of losing...and dying.  It was, in short, a course designed to be an “equalizer”, to make men of all sizes, shapes and dispositions as uniformly dangerous as possible in given situations.

Go for the throat

Kicking another combatant in the solar plexus, smashing his knees, crushing his testicles, fracturing his nose bridge or gouging out one of his eyes were methods used to slow him down long enough to finish the job with a bayonet. But in order to deliver a killing blow, we were taught to concentrate on the throat, specifically seeking to crush the windpipe and deprive the opponent of the ability to breathe. This was, the sergeant drilled into us over and over again, the great equalizer. Whether with hands, feet or blade, go for the throat, and go for it right away, before the enemy could go for yours. You only needed, he said, five pounds of pressure per square inch to crush the trachea and block airways to the lungs and brain. And without air, no matter how big or how well-trained your opponent was, he was going down. There was, in short, a reason that the idiomatic expression “go for the throat” was used to describe ruthless disregard for the life of an opponent.

In the days since George Floyd was wantonly murdered—before multiple witnesses and on multiple cameras—by a Minneapolis police officer named Derek Chauvin, I have repeatedly recalled this training. The reason it has come to mind is that reiterated attempts have been made by apologists for bad law enforcement to argue that Floyd’s death can be blamed on “insufficient training” for police officers. This argument has been combined with the almost ludicrous proposal by the local coroner that the throat of the victim showed no sign of trauma and that he might have died of pre-existing medical conditions exacerbated by excessive force employed by the police.

To my mind, the first of these arguments is implausible, while the second is preposterous and reminds me of when the notorious former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, Daryl Gates, argued that black men were more susceptible to death resulting from strangleholds because of some genetic defect. According to Gates, in a statement he made in 1982, “We may be finding that in some blacks when (a stranglehold) is applied the veins and arteries do not open as fast as they do in normal people.” 

The posit of the coroner’s report seems to me to justify Floyd’s family’s decision to commission an independent autopsy (which, logically enough, concluded that the victim had died of asphyxia). While the idea that a policeman, no matter how minimal his training has been, wouldn’t know that kneeling on a man’s throat for eight minutes would kill him—especially when the victim repeatedly and desperately told his aggressor that he couldn’t breathe, when the victim in his final moments begged for his mother, and when, for over two of those eight minutes, the victim was unresponsive—is simply impossible to believe.

Why impossible? Well, if in standard Basic Combat Training for the US Army, the purpose of which was to give me my first eight weeks of instruction in the “art” of effective killing, I learned that the throat was the most vulnerable part of a human being in a quick-kill survival situation on the battlefield, how could a big-city police officer’s training be so utterly deficient that he wouldn’t know that pressing a handcuffed, defenseless man’s neck with all of his weight on his knee for eight minutes would result in the detainee’s death. I have consciously known this, as I say, since I was twenty (and, in all fairness, knew it even before I joined the Army, as do, very likely, the majority of children over, say, the age of ten) after only the most standard and basic of eight-week combat courses—the purpose of which, let me reiterate, was to teach me to kill people. I have known ever since then that a blow to the throat or a lethal stranglehold is not something you apply in a scuffle following a fender-bender or as a way of settling an argument, or if someone disrespects you. It has only one use: killing an opponent in a life and death situation.

That’s not the only reason that the “insufficient training” argument doesn’t fly as an excuse for the killing of George Floyd. If the City of Minneapolis website is to be believed, the city’s police officers go through intensive training. This training includes, among other things, defensive tactics, community orientated policing, firearms, defensive driving, report writing, ethics, traffic enforcement, crime scene investigation and physical training. It lasts from fourteen to sixteen weeks—at its maximum duration, twice the time devoted to our basic combat training when I was in the Army. And once recruits graduate, which they must in order to become Minneapolis police officers, they are then required to submit to a six-month on-the-job training period with a veteran training officer.

Derek Chauvin is no rookie whose fear and inexperience led him to make a mistake. At the time of his dismissal and subsequent arrest, he had been on the Minneapolis police force for eighteen years. Indeed, he was a veteran officer who had surely been in no few situations like the one he faced in taking George Floyd into custody, allegedly for trying to pass a phony twenty-dollar bill—the summary penalty for which ended up being torture and execution.

But here, perhaps, a little context is in order. It would appear that Chauvin isn’t just a cop who was having the kind of bad day Michael Douglas had in the movie Falling Down, and, inexplicably, took it out on a detainee. Use of force reports indicate that Minneapolis police officers have applied neck and throat restraints no fewer than two hundred thirty-seven times in the last five years. And in forty-four of those cases, those being detained lost consciousness. It would appear, then, that Chauvin’s using his knee to choke George Floyd, while three of his colleagues held Floyd down and kept at bay onlookers who were begging Chauvin to stop before he killed his captive wasn’t some momentary lapse on the part of an otherwise by-the-book officer. It seems that the use of strangleholds has been a relatively widespread practice among Minneapolis police—one of which local authorities should certainly have been aware.

It is almost impossible to come to any conclusion other than that George Floyd was intentionally and brutally murdered. And the whole thing played out across the US and the world on cellphones, social media and television. We all saw it happen. And any decent human being who was watching knew without a doubt that what he or she was witnessing was wrong. Many of us were outraged and desperate while we watched. So were onlookers who pleaded again and again for the police to stop applying what was undoubtedly lethal force, eyewitnesses that clearly saw that George Floyd was already immobilized, in custody and no longer a threat to the arresting officers.

The only people who seem not to have known that it was wrong, that what they were witnessing and participating in was what forensics experts refer to as wrongful death, were Dereck Chauvin and the three men who aided and abetted him in carrying out a gruesome murder.

Or perhaps, they knew perfectly well what they were doing and simply didn’t care.

The first tentative charge against Chauvin was “third degree murder and third degree manslaughter”. Few if any news people had ever heard of such a charge. And CNN’s talk show host Van Jones seemed to speak for many of us when he said he could think of no other homicide in which such a charge had been implemented and speculated that the idea was to start low “and then plea-bargain it down to a traffic ticket” so as to let the cop and his accomplices off scot-free.

Latest reports suggest, however, that authorities may now be leveling second ­degree homicide charges against Chauvin. This still, however, would presuppose that the former officer killed Floyd unintentionally, which the facts—including his continuing to kneel, pressing down with all his weight, on Floyd’s neck even long after the victim had stopped moving or talking and no longer had a pulse—seem to graphically belie.

Finally, today, June 3, it was reported that the prosecution in the case has also finally charged the other three officers,  Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao with aiding and abetting murder. Kueng was in custody, and authorities said they were in the process of arresting Lane and Thao. But it seems clear that the authorities have been reluctant to prosecute bad law enforcement and outright murder, since the upgraded charge against Chauvin and the first-ever charges against the other three officers have only come after a week of rioting and mass protests all across the United States.

Will justice prevail in the murder of George Floyd? It remains to be seen. But if not, it is likely that we will have reached a tipping point for the average American’s patience.