Eh?
That's incorrect.
For the second time in recent months, I've been asked by somebody what I thought of 1) the accusations against Kyle Rittenhouse and the 2) trial of Kyle Rittenhouse.
This presume that I'm following anything in regard to Kyle Rittenhouse.
I know a little more about his situation than I did a couple of days ago, but only as I started to pay a little more attention after it was brought to my attention for the third time.
The first time I was in a trial myself and was called by a client. "What do you think about the accusations against Rittenhouse?".
I had no idea what this referred to, even though I was dimly aware that some teenager carrying a M4 style carbine had killed somebody in a disturbance somewhere. More recently, the same person asked what I thought of about was coming out at the trial.
"I've been so busy, I haven't been following it".
That was true, but only partially so. I wasn't following it, and I am very busy, but I don't usually follow criminal trials anyhow.
Finally, I was in a deposition when the verdict came in. The deponent actually had his phone set to rig a bell when the news came in, he was following it so closely. He actually asked if we could take a break to read about it.
No break.
In the next break, none of the lawyers discussed it. One spoke about his upcoming holiday where he was going to a Ferrari race car driving school. That did sound pretty interesting.
This brings up a couple of things.
Living by the sword
I knew a former University of Wyoming football player who didn't follow football at all. He was always caught flat-footed when somebody asked his opinion on football matters. He'd played football and presumably liked it, but he just didn't follow it after his college athletic career concluded
I get that.
If you work every day in the law, you have a lawyers prospective, but given that, you likely know that there's a lot nobody knows about anything being tried and, moreover, the Press isn't very good at reporting trials anyhow.
And frankly, most criminal trials are exclusively local news stories, not worth reporting on as big national news. This one is a slight exception, but it's getting a lot more press than it deserves and people are drawling conclusions which likely aren't merited.
One big conclusion is that lawyers are a lot less interested in the "big news" trials than other people seem to be.
There's probably a reason for that.
So what I now know is this.
Ritterhouse was 17 years old and went to a protest carrying a M4 type carbine. The protest was racially charged and arose from an earlier Kenosha police shooting of an African American man. Ritterhouse, while only 17, had an association with the current right-wing populist militia type groups. He spent part of the night marching around, much like the armed men in downtown Casper during a similar event last summer.
While there, he encountered a Joseph Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum had been belligerent all night and at some point chased Ritterhouse. Somebody fired a shot in the air, and Rosenbaum lunged at Ritterhouse and tried to disarm him. Ritterhouse shot and killed him. He then fled on foot and was pursued and physically attacked. The last assailant pointed a pistol at him but was only wounded when Ritterhouse fired first.
With that set of facts, there is no crime to commit Ritterhouse of. He acted in self-defense.
Which doesn't really excuse him, or indeed some of the crowd.
Some things to consider.
Ritterhouse is part of the delusional set that exists in our country that feels that they need to walk around like they live in Hue in 1968. They don't, and it's dumb. It should stop. Now he seems genuinely remorseful, but he'll live with killing two other humans for the rest of his life, and it'll be ages before he escapes what occurred. Frankly, he probably ought to change his name and disappear for a long while. Lt. Calley overcame his crimes, so Ritterhouse will this too, but it'll be a long time.
He shouldn't have been there.
Next, while this event was supposedly over the killing of a black man by the police, all those involved in these shootings were white. White right-wing militia kid Ritterhouse and three white protestors.
Joseph Rosenbaum was being belligerent and was just out of the hospital after trying to commit suicide. He was a convicted child molester.
He should have been in the hospital.
His family showed up to protest the results, complete with a sister with a nose ring. I'm not going much further on this, but Ritterhouse was not only a mess, but at least a partially icky violent mess. That he got shot isn't all that surprising.
The second shooting victim, Anthony Huber, had served two prison stints, one for domestic abuse and one for trying to choke his brother.
The third guy, the one who was wounded, pointed his handgun at Ritterhouse "accidentally", but also had a criminal history. He had a concealed firearms permit which, oddly enough, expired that day.
You can draw lessons from this, and the survivors should. Almost none of them will be the ones that are bandied about by anyone.
And once again, African Americans, who do have a story to tell here, have had their thunder stolen by a bunch of youthful whites ended up playing out on the stage when this really ought to have been focused on something else.
Let the stupid comments begin
Notwithstanding the fact that most people don't understand how the legal system actually works, there will be floods of really bad punditry and for that matter just regular public comment as a result of the verdict. Some will demand that Ritterhouse be hauled in front of a Federal Court as they perceive that justice wasn't done, others will want to give him the Congressional Medal of Honor for being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with insufficient maturity not to appreciate that he wasn't Sgt. York.
Already I've seen a comment on a list serve that's usually dedicated to lost cats and such things.
Uff.
Free Peng Shuai
I hope that Peng Shuai gets at least as much attention.
I don't follow women's professional tennis, which is no surprise as the only professional sport I really follow is baseball, and this year I couldn't even get into it. At any rate, I take it that she is a well known, and Chinese, tennis star.
She recently accused Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of forcing sex upon her.
It's actually more complicated, and frankly icky, than that. It started off, apparently, as an off and on extramarital affair and concluded with an assault, she alleges, with guard posted outside of her door.
And she's now disappeared.
The Chinese are really resisting opening up on this, which demonstrates what a thugocracy it is. Sooner or later it'll fall, but right now it has a chokehold on the Chinese people and is looking to expand its brutal grip over Taiwan.
We only put up with this due to money.
The Chinese Communists are bad for everything. They're bad for the Chinese, and they're bad for the environment. It ought to stop.
The US is demanding to know what's up with her whereabouts. The Chinese, who are used to simply offing the difficult, seem surprised and more than caught a little off guard.
The proletariat
The Peng episode brings up something that will play itself out in the coming years, and probably more rapidly than we might suspect.
Most of the Chinese are still very poor, but as they build a middle class, that middle class is not going to cooperate with being out of power. There is already a Me Too Movement in China, and it's pretty clear the authoritarian government doesn't know what to do about it.
This is no surprise as it doesn't know what to do with the democracy movement either.
The infusion of money into people's hands eventually transforms them into a class that wants some sort of power. It doesn't always work perfectly at first, as Russia provides ample evidence of. And on the flipside, rich capitalist countries can undermine themselves by failing to heed Jefferson's warnings about wide scale funding of the public feeding trough, which I suspect may relate to more in this post than people are willing to admit.
Chanteuse
Apparently Taylor Swift and Adele have new releases out.
M'eh.
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