andersweinstein wrote: ↑Mon Jun 05, 2023 11:27 pm
Maybenaut wrote: ↑Mon Jun 05, 2023 11:10 pm
andersweinstein wrote: ↑Mon Jun 05, 2023 7:25 pm
I think everyone, even people who disagree with me,
ought to acknowledge at least that he had a strong self-defense claim under the law.
I’m willing to acknowledge that *the jury* thought his self-defense claim was, at a minimum, reasonably plausible. I wouldn’t speculate beyond that - I wouldn’t have any way of knowing whether they thought it was “strong,” for example.
I simply meant a self-defense case with a good chance of winning, that is, getting him acquitted by the jury. I don't mean the jury assessed its strength.
From my perspective as a non-lawyer, the prosecution had
very little evidence inconsistent with his self-defense claims, and some of their witnesses' testimony even strengthened his case. This is admittedly a more subjective assessment.
Except for the dead guys.
You never know what a jury is going to find credible. But
just because even if the jury found the self defense claim credible, it doesn’t follow that everyone else will. That’s why, try as you might, you’re not ever going convince the people you’re arguing with here that you are right and they are wrong. You obviously find the claim credible, but not everyone does. People are free to believe that the jury got it wrong.
I personally don’t buy the self defense claim (and I’m a criminal defense lawyer with many years of experience, so don’t waste your time or mine trying to explain it to me). But the jury
may have bought it.
Notice I didn’t say “did.” Jury nullification is rare, but it’s not unheard of. Who was that guy from Malhuer? The one caught in town driving a government truck? The jury acquitted him of misappropriation of government property. He was clearly guilty - not his truck, didn’t have the consent of the government to drive it, caught with it 20 miles from where the government left it parked. But he was acquitted of that and he didn’t even have a defense to the crime that the government had to disprove. The
only rational explanation for that verdict was jury nullification.
Just like Malhuer, the Rittenhouse trial was politically charged, and because of that I think the
potential for nullification was greater. I’m not convinced (and you could never convince me, so don’t bother trying) that the Rittenhouse verdict was not the product of nullification. Assuming the jury was properly instructed (and we’ll never know because the State cannot appeal an acquittal), there are three possible explanations for the verdict: (1) they thought the government failed to prove an element of each offense; (2) they found the self defense claim credible; or (3) they nullified. But I have no way of knowing.
My point is, juries get things wrong with monotonous regularity. The 3,000 some-odd people who have been exonerated since the late 1980s when the University of Michigan started keeping track is proof of that. And every single one of those people was convicted on the basis of evidence that the jury found credible. But just because a jury made a credibility determination about a particular fact doesn’t make that fact
true. It just provides a measure of legal finality.
So the
most I’m willing to say is that he was acquitted. But the fact of his acquittal is meaningless to me as it relates to whether
I think he’s guilty. I watched the trial. I think the State proved its case. I don’t think the self-defense claim was credible, and I think the jury got it wrong.
You will never convince me otherwise.
"Hey! We left this England place because it was bogus, and if we don't get some cool rules ourselves, pronto, we'll just be bogus too!" -- Thomas Jefferson