Today we will have the Judge read the jury instructions to the jury. That should take about 45 minutes. The closing arguments will then occur. This will take approximately five hours with half the time allotted to each side. The State, as is customary, will open and close since the State has the burden of proof, that burden being beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury then begins deliberations. Might begin today, perhaps tomorrow morning. The trial should resume around 9:00 AM CT. Go here for a live feed of the trial with a lot of attorney commentary.
Here are recaps of the last week in the Rittenhouse trial:
It’s time to stop treating liberals as normal people.
It’s time to stop treating liberals as normal people.
You look at who they invest in (Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Christine Blasey Ford, George Floyd) and who they hate (George Zimmerman, Darren Wilson, Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge, Derek Chauvin, and Kyle Rittenhouse) and you realize there is something deeply disordered about them.
The closing arguments of the prosecution are so dishonest as to serve no point other than mocking the public about how such dishonest arguments can be brought forth in a court of law.
-It’s just a fist fight (ignoring the fact that one of his attackers had a gun)! No one has ever died in fist fights before, so self defense is irrelevant.
-Kyle should have been able to run away faster and escape. I mean yeah, he was running away, which destroys my obvious that he was the aggressor, but it’s still his fault since his attackers caught up to him.
-There’s no evidence that Rosenbaum reached for the gun. In fact, there’s evidence that he wasn’t. No, that never came up in testimony and I’m not going to refer to any actual evidence here, but I’m still going to insist that there was evidence that he wasn’t reaching for Kyle’s gun.
And now he’s saying that Kyle is at fault for running away, since he should have stayed and provided medical aid! He’s literally said that Kyle is both guilty for getting away and for not getting away!
(That’s of course not even getting into the fact that Kyle immediately tried to turn himself over to the authorities.)
Oh wait, now the argument is that by running away and not shooting warning shots at the crowd, THAT was provocation.
Law question: Can the defense object during closing arguments? If so, what advantage is there in not objecting to blatant distortions of facts and lies about the law?
The defense can object at any time. Usually the court gives a fair amount of leeway to both sides in closing argument.
I get that it’s not a good idea to object too much during closing arguments, since they argumentative by nature. But take for example Binger’s claim that the reasonable thing to do would by for Kyle to fire warning shots instead of running away, and that by not doing this he provoked the crowd and thus negated his right to self defense. This not only is a misstatement of self-defense law, but also says that he should have engaged in reckless endangerment. That’s not an argument, that’s misleading the jury about the law.
I’m just a layman, but that seems like a really good time to object to me.
Though at this point the prosecution’s argument is so long, rambling, and condescending that I’m starting to think that the jury might give a not guilty verdict just to spite him.
I am looking forward to Mr. McClarey’s analysis of the closing arguments. I understand the [bizarrely inclined] prosecutor Thomas Binger ran and re-ran the video of Rittenhouse being savagely attacked and chased by the rioters, including by Joseph Rosenbaum and by Gaige Grosskreutz. How this helps the prosecution is hard to fathom. He also (according to the NY Post) during the closing arguments took the rifle used by Rittenhouse and in an attempt at dramatics, utterly irresponsibly swept the room with his finger on the trigger—proving his ignorance of firearm safety.
What a moron.
But the question now is if we have people of intellectual integrity and courage on the jury