What will the jury do in the Rittenhouse case?

criminal Justice, Extremism, Vigilantism, violence

 

I have been fascinated by the case of Kyle Rittenhouse since the day I heard about it.  I think the Associated Press captured the issue well: “the shootings that left Americans divided over whether he was a patriot taking a stand against lawlessness or a vigilante.” That is exactly what I have been trying to figure out. It seems everyone on the left thinks he is a crazed self-appointed vigilante while those on the right see him as a glamorous defender of life and property. Which is it?

Rittenhouse testified on his own behalf, which is always a risky move. Yet an innocent man should be entitled to present his own defence. That is what Rittenhouse did. He told the jury under oath that he was defending himself when he used the rifle he brought to the Kenosha from the neighbouring state of Illinois where he lived declaring his intentions on the internet to defend property.  A true public protector, or a true vigilante?  The judge was expected to give his final instructions to the jury today.

The prosecutors tried to portray Rittenhouse as the instigator of the bloodshed. There was video footage of 3 people coming after Rittenhouse and one tried to grab his rifle. He said he heard a shot and turned to the pursuers and shot at them. He killed two people and injured a third. The jury “appeared largely white” according to the Associated Press reporters. That is not surprising since Wisconsin is largely white.

One of the final witnesses for the defence was a use-of-force expert, John Black, who testified that less than three seconds elapsed between the time somebody fired a bullet in the air and Rittenhouse opened fire on the first man he shot, Joseph Rosenbaum. Rittenhouse testified that he heard a gunshot directly behind him as he was being chased by Rosenbaum. It is not clear who made shot, but apparently it was none of the three men chasing Rittenhouse.

According to the Associated Press,

 

“The account Rittenhouse gave has largely been corroborated by a wealth of video and the prosecution’s own witnesses: Rittenhouse said that Rosenbaum cornered him and put his hand on the barrel of his rifle, the second man hit him with a skateboard, and the third man came at him with a gun of his own. At one point Wednesday, his lawyers demanded the judge declare mistrial and bar Rittenhouse from being retried — essentially asking that the case be thrown out. They accused the chief prosecutor of asking Rittenhouse out-of- bounds questions. The judge lambasted the prosecutor but pressed on with the case.”

 

I am particularly interested in the question of vigilantism that is so prominent in the US. It arises because of a distrust in the government that is also so prevalent in cases of people who refuse to be vaccinated. These issues are related.  There is another case going on right now as well in Georgia that raises similar issues. It is quite possible that those who don’t like the result will protest vigorously. That seems to happen with every trial in the US where the country is so deeply divided and polarized. We certainly live in interesting times.

This is not an easy case. The onus of proof is on the prosecutors who must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Rittenhouse is guilty. If not Rittenhouse will be a hero! Even if he doesn’t deserve to be. It will be interesting to see what the jury does.

 

The trial in Kenosha

Polarization, Vigilantism

 

Kyle Rittenhouse in August of 2020 travelled to Kenosha from his home in Illinois during unrest that broke out after a white Kenosha police officer injured a black protester who was protesting the police violence against a black man.  The case has aroused the interested of the American public on both sides. The police officer shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, in the back.

Rittenhouse had heard online how Black Lives Matter and left-wing radical groups such as Antifa, were attacking white businesses in Kenosha and patriots needed to go their to protect them.  He brought a rifle and a medical kit with him. Rittenhouse’s ostensible goal, according to his own statements was that he went there to protect property after two previous nights marked by arson, gunfire and the ransacking of businesses. He wanted to be an “unofficial deputy”, which really amounts to being a vigilante.

 

Historically, in America, self-conceived patriots would come to the rescue of the government who could never be trusted to do the right thing. The vigilantes would come to the rescue to protect America. It happened over and over again, perhaps no where more regularly than the southern border with Mexico. Read, for example, a shocking book by Cormac McCarthy called Blood Meridian. You will never be the same after reading it. I have blogged about it earlier.

Here I think are some undisputed facts about the present case as reported by the Associated Press:

“Rittenhouse fatally shot Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, after Rosenbaum chased Rittenhouse across a parking lot and threw a plastic bag at him shortly before midnight on Aug. 25. Moments later, as Rittenhouse was running down a street, he shot and killed Anthony Huber, 26, a protester from Silver Lake, Wisconsin, and wounded Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, a demonstrator from West Allis, Wisconsin.

Bystander video captured Rosenbaum chasing Rittenhouse but not the actual shooting. Video showed Huber swinging a skateboard at Rittenhouse before he was shot. Grosskreutz had a gun in his hand as he stepped toward Rittenhouse.

Rittenhouse faces two homicide counts and one of attempted homicide, along with charges of reckless endangering and illegal possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18.”

 

I am looking forward to learning how the jury sees the evidence.

Rittenhouse has been charged with first degree murder but what is interesting to me is how differently he is viewed by those on the left or those on the right. As Scott Bauer, Michael Tarm and Amy Forliti reported for the Associated Press,

“Rittenhouse has been painted by supporters on the right — including foes of the Black Lives Matter movement — as a patriot who took a stand against lawlessness by demonstrators and exercised his Second Amendment gun rights. Others see him as a vigilante and police wannabe.

He is white, as were those he shot, but many activists see an undercurrent of race in the case, in part because the protesters were on the streets to decry police violence against Black people.”

The judge repeatedly reminded the jurors of what he believed, but what was palpably wrong, namely that “This is not a political trial.”  A political trial is exactly what it will has been, though understandably the judge is trying his best to make it otherwise. I believe that is be impossible.

The judge pointed out that both sides were making political hay out of the trial.  Both sides, as always happens in politics and particularly in the United States have tried to make it political. They both want the judge to say, “Hooray for our side,” to quote Buffalo Springfield.

The jury, though mainly white, from appearances,  does seem to be composed of many sides (both sides?). According to the Associated Press, “One of the jurors is a gun-owning woman with a high school education who said she was so afraid during the protests that she pulled her cars to the back of her house and made sure her doors were locked. She said she went downtown in the aftermath and cried.” The Associated Press said this about another juror: “Another woman chosen is a special education teacher who expressed anxiety about being on the jury: “I figure either way this goes you’re going to have half the country upset with you and they react poorly.”

Who can deny the truth of that? In a deeply polarized country like the United States that seems inevitable

Kenosha: What happened?

Rebellion and Resistance, Vigilantism, violence

 

A very interesting trial is going on in Wisconsin that is dividing the country.

In the summer of 2020, the city of Kenosha Wisconsin became the site of large and active protests after Jacob Blake, an African American man was wounded by Wisconsin police officers. The protests got carried away with widespread fears expressed on the internet that businesses might be looted and destroyed. Kyle Rittenhouse drove to Kenosha from his home in Antioch Illinois. He took with him two things one would not normally expect to go together. One was a medical kit and the other was a rifle.

Rittenhouse was charged with first-degree intentional homicide, which apparently what is called murder in Wisconsin, and as well attempted first-degree intentional homicide for the man who lived, and first-degree reckless homicide; reckless endangering; and illegal possession of a weapon by a person under 18.

All serious charges. Was he a murderer as many on the left alleged or was he a public warrior/defender as many on the right claim? This issue has captured national attention.

The protesters included many whites and blacks. Rittenhouse is white, as were those he shot. The jury, which appears to be mainly white, will make the decision. Inevitably, a large part of the US will be upset while another large part will be jubilant. It is guaranteed that many people in the US will not agree with the decision of the jury. The judge was adamant that this would not become a political trial, but many think that is exactly what it became.

Rittenhouse  said he was going there to protect businesses that had been ransacked the night before. The rifle, he claimed, was for self-defence. Rittenhouse was white, but so were the 3 men he shot. 2 of them died from the gunshot wounds. As the Associated Press reported,

“The case has stirred fierce debate over vigilantism, self-defence, the Second Amendment right to bear arms, and the unrest that erupted around the U.S. over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and other police violence against Black people.”

 

That is a very important issue. Throughout American history vigilantism has been frequent, violent, and controversial. This case is no exception. It will be very interesting to learn what the jury thinks of the case.

 

Global Warming on Life Support

Climate change, Environmental Apocalypse

 

The COP26 conference in Glasgow is into its last day of negotiations and deliberations. And as always happens, progress is made on the last day. Usually that means minimal progress. I think that is the correct characterization again.

Today I heard Michael Mann a widely respected climate change scientist say he was optimistic.  That shocked me. He said the Americans and Chinese made an agreement whereby they each committed to do more to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. That was good. But was it good enough?

According to the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is “on life support” as UN climate talks enter their final days, but he added that “until the last moment, hope should be maintained.”

The youthful protesters outside the conference walls have been protesting the lack of progress. Greta Thunberg said it was just so much “Blah, Blah, Blah.”  That’s what I thought too. I hope Mann is right and she is wrong. I was very pessimistic when I learned the fossil fuel industry had more representatives at the conference than any one country!  No wonder I saw a photo of one of the youthful protesters with a sign that read, “Why is the fossil fuel industry inside?”  That is a pretty good question.

A few years ago already the countries of the world promised to provide $100 billion dollars a year to undeveloped countries to compensate them for damages and losses they incurred as a result of climate change largely brought on by the wealthy countries of the world. So far, despite the promises they have not ponied up with the promised cash. The UN Secretary had the right response to this uncomfortable fact: “promises ring hollow when the fossil fuels industry still receives trillions in subsidies… or when countries are still building coal plants.” Such promises don’t just ring hollow; they stink.  Guterres as right when he said this gap exposed a “glaring injustice.” After all, the undeveloped countries have not caused the global warming, but they have been suffering the most. Not fair! Not helpful!

Remembrance Day

War, War in Afghanistan

 

On Remembrance Day we are asked to think about war and those who gave their lives for our freedoms. That’s not a bad idea. Yet, I can’t help thinking about a very current war. One that is far from over even though it was “declared” more than 2 decades ago—the war on terror. This in turn led directly to the war in Afghanistan that took 20 years until the Americans who initiated it, packed their tents and went home, leaving behind hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment and carrying with them memories of thousands of injured and lost lives and more than a trillion dollars paid by American taxpayers for not much of value in return.

I am not a pacifist. At least technically. Like Obama said, “we should avoid dumb wars.” And I agree. I just think they are pretty well all dumb wars.

So why can’t we celebrate those who helped us avoid wars or at least did their best to save us from the dumb wars?  I think of Bertrand Russell who went to jail in World War I because he refused to serve in what he thought (rightly so) was a dumb war. I think World War I was one of the dumbest. As the song goes, “War—what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.” In his autobiography Russell wrote about the people in London at Trafalgar Square who turned out in delirious celebratory joy when England declared war on Germany in 1914. Soon after that the dead soldiers began to pile up and again without much accomplished.  Let’s remember Bertrand Russell.

Congress woman Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against going to war in Afghanistan. Some called her a traitor. She was a hero.

She said she thought long and hard about that war, and it took a while for her to come to a decision. She said when she spoke in Congress about whether to go to war she thought about what she had heard Reverend Nathan Baxter say in his opening invocation at the memorial service at Washington Cathedral 3 days after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Baxter prayed this: “Let us also pray for divine wisdom as our leaders consider the necessary actions for national security, wisdom of the grace of God, that as we act, we not become the evil we deplore.”

That was wisdom unlike the loud clamorous demands for revenge and war. Let’s remember Barbara Lee today.

I do not object to remembering the men and women who fell in battle trying to defend our liberties. They made the supreme sacrifice after all. If the wars were dumb that was not their fault. Their country asked for their service and they gave it wholeheartedly.

I just want to think about those as well who tried to keep us out of wars. No one is going around selling poppies to remember them.

Southern Health: Black Sheep of the Family

Epidemics/Pandemics

 

By now everyone in Manitoba knows the black sheep of the Covid family can be found in the Southern Health District where I live.

 

As Katie May and Carol Sanders reported in the Winnipeg Free Press: “The 14.5 per cent test positivity rate in the Southern Health region, revealed in provincial data Friday, is triple the province wide number.”

According to the health professionals this also means that there is more Covid-19 in the Community than they previously thought. Southern Health might be singled out for greater restrictions than the other regions of the province. Even though I am from Southern Health and am doubled vaxxed, I must admit that this makes sense.

For weeks now, not just a couple of days the rate of new infections has as high or higher than Winnipeg even though it has 5 times our population.  We are 5 times as likely to get infected in our district than Winnipeg! We also have the lowest rates of vaccine uptake in Manitoba.  It is clear as can be that vaccine are working. not perfectly but enough to be a life saver!

Our regions has been bad. We are the black sheep of the family. Why should the rest of the province risk contamination from us? Can you blame them if they don’t want to? Can anyone blame them if they want to impose greater restrictions on us?

An Interesting Pandemic

Epidemics/Pandemics

I keep coming back to the pandemic because it is so very interesting. I learned recently that the global death toll from Covid-19 exceeded 5 million. The Associated Press reported it this way:

“The global death toll from COVID-19 topped 5 million on Monday, less than two years into a crisis that has not only devastated poor countries but also humbled wealthy ones with first-rate health care systems.

Together, the United States, the European Union, Britain and Brazil — all upper-middle- or high-income countries — account for one-eighth of the world’s population but nearly half of all reported deaths. The U.S. alone has recorded over 745,000 lives lost, more than any other nation.”

 

There are many interesting things about this pandemic. Some like the amount of vaccine hesitancy I would never have dreamed possible. Another is the fact that this pandemic, unlike so many others, is in some ways affecting the wealthy more than the poor. How can that possibly be the case?

The death toll has been prepared by Johns Hopkins Hospital in the US, and according to Carla Johnson, of the Associate Press, it rivals the numbers of killed in all battles since 1950 according to the Peace Research Institute in Oslo. It is also now the global 3rd leading cause of death behind heart disease and stroke. Johnson also claims the numbers are probably underestimates on account of limited testing and people dying at home in many places.

Johnson reported an even more interesting aspect of this pandemic:

“What’s uniquely different about this pandemic is it hit hardest the high-resource countries,” said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, director of ICAP, a global health center at Columbia University. “That’s the irony of COVID-19.”

 

Wealthier nations with longer life expectancies have larger proportions of older people, cancer survivors and nursing home residents, all of whom are especially vulnerable to COVID-19, El-Sadr noted. Poorer countries tend to have larger shares of children, teens and young adults, who are less likely to fall seriously ill from the coronavirus.

Added to that, nearly 80% of the deaths are among the obese, and the wealthy parts of the world, like North America have an abundance of the obese. Thus there is good reason for the rich to be hit harder.

Yet the rich, as always, have some advantages too. Usually they have much better access to health care and drugs, but in this case there is no cure for Covid-19. There are only vaccines and these are largely held by the rich countries.

Yet inside the rich countries it is the poorer people who are hardest hit. As Johnson said,

“The seeming disconnect between wealth and health is a paradox that disease experts will be pondering for years. But the pattern that is seen on the grand scale, when nations are compared, is different when examined at closer range. Within each wealthy country, when deaths and infections are mapped, poorer neighbourhoods are hit hardest.”

In the U.S. Covid-19 has hit African Americans and Hispanic people more than whites. Probably that is because they are more vaccine hesitant because of historic distrust of government (for good reason in many cases) and the fact that more of them live in poverty and have less access to health care. In Canada, indigenous people have been hit hard, for similar reasons, but also because  a significant portion of them live in isolated communities were social contact is so extremely important and while many of them live in overcrowded housing.

There is another crucial issue—the wealth gap and hoarding of vaccines. As Johnson reported,

“Wealth has also played a role in the global vaccination drive, with rich countries accused of locking up supplies. The U.S. and others are already dispensing booster shots at a time when millions across Africa haven’t received a single dose, though the rich countries are also shipping hundreds of millions of shots to the rest of the world.”

Africa remains the world’s least vaccinated region, with just 5 per cent of the population of 1.3 billion people fully covered.

It is good that wealthy countries like the United States have donated huge numbers of vaccines.  But the figures above show that the rich countries as a group have not done enough. Some have called this a moral catastrophe.  U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said, “This is a global shame.”

Not only that, this is creating a potential monumental disaster, because the longer the rich countries allow the virus to smoulder throughout the world the greater the chances of new and perhaps even more deadly variants mutating. If they are hoarding, those rich countries might come to deeply regret it.

Is it rational to be selfish?

Epidemics/Pandemics

 

We in the west continuously tout how generous we have been to the rest of the world. But our generosity has shown limits.

Africa, which is the furthest behind in its vaccine rollout having only fully vaccinated 3.6% of its 1.3 billion population, is set to be largely affected by the reduction in vaccine deliveries.

Vaccine equity is vital to end COVID-19 pandemic. As Global Citizen said,

“If everyone everywhere does not have access to a vaccine, the pandemic can only continue and millions of lives will remain at stake.” And those lives won’t only be in Africa. Vaccine equity is key to ending the COVID-19 pandemic. If everyone everywhere does not have access to a vaccine, the pandemic can only continue and millions of lives will remain at stake.”

 

Selfishness is dangerous when it comes to pandemics because by now we know that the longer the pandemic remains unchecked the longer the virus can mutate and the greater the chances that by natural selection the most dangerous virus will thrive. Again, when that happens the virus won’t just stay with the unvaccinated.

As the Guardian said in an editorial: “New variants—wherever they arise—are a threat to lives worldwide.” That is why delays in getting the vaccines to the developing world is such a dangerous thing and why selfishness is foolish. Forget about morality it is just not wise to favour ourselves too sharply. As the Guardian said, “Protecting others is the right thing to do. It is also the best way to protect ourselves.”