The Kyle Rittenhouse trial is a farce. A travesty, and potentially will end up being one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in history (and not just US history, either).
From the get-go, it’s clear that the judge has an agenda: to get Rittenhouse acquitted. That shows up time and again, whether it is a ruling on the language that can be used in the courtroom to describe the people that Rittenhouse shot, or clearly trying to hamstring the prosecutor’s line of questioning, the judge is playing games because he knows this trial is being watched closely by other Trumpists. My guess is that this judge is playing electoral politics - but he’s also playing with fire - and the fire is outside his courtroom.
I’ve mused repeatedly on this blog about how toxic partisanship has become in our politics. Remember that in the US, county level judges are elected, and therefore are intrinsically political to begin with. Schroeder’s actions during the Rittenhouse trial strongly suggest bias in the case, and call into question how objectively he can oversee the trial.
My expectation at this point is that Rittenhouse will be acquitted - even though there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate not just intent, but a violent intent tinged with an unpleasant side of racism. But, when the judge overseeing the trial does things like rule that you cannot call the victims of a shooting ‘victims’, it’s pretty clear that the trial is already prejudiced.
… and then there’s the point in the trial where the judge’s cell phone starts ringing, and it happens to play the song that Trump uses when he walks on stage. That’s where partisanship walks into the room and drops its pants.
The results of this trial will go down in history as the moment that it became abundantly clear that the American judiciary has become a purely partisan entity, and it will then come to matter in the courts whether the accused is known to belong to “the other party”, or if the accused is being tried for something that the judge’s party approves of.
Even if an acquittal is eventually overturned on appeal because of various legal errors made by the presiding judge, the fact of the matter will still be that the trial process - especially at the local levels - is now subject to partisan considerations. If you thought the riots after George Floyd was killed were something, just wait until marginalized people figure that out.
2 comments:
You're right. The judge has repeatedly displayed incredible bias and, yes, it's probably to bolster his prospects of re-election. Will an appellate court in that state correct it, order a new trial? I wish I was more confident on that point.
Either way, Rittenhouse is transformed into a martyr in the eyes of the radical right. No need to watch FOX News to guess how this is being spun out by Tucker Carlson.
The problem is that because it's jury trial, the verdict is the jury's to arrive at and essentially a jury is deemed to never make mistakes - those verdicts are almost impossible to overturn. Then we get into the delightful complications of trying to show that the trial itself was tainted or invalid because of the judge's rulings / attitudes / whatever, and that gets really quite difficult in part because doing so would literally mean the appellate court would have to agree that the lower court judge's behaviour was so egregious that it invalidates the jury trial. That would be seen as a hell of a slap-down of the trial judge.
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