argument that the prosecutor put out there. she went through each one of the charges, actually said to the jury the order in which she thought they should consider those charges. she kept coming back to two phrases, common sense and critical thinking. how effective is it when a prosecutor approaches the jury in that way? i thought she was really effective, erica. the defense has been factually deprived in this case from the get-go. mcmichael s testimony did not help at all. we saw the defendant become the prosecution star witness. he confirmed there was no threat, that really the only threat were the three defendants committing multiple felonies that this prosecutor laid out very clearly, refuting self-defense. you don t get to commit felonies and be the first aggressor and under the self-defense law in georgia claim self-defense. she went through this methodically in terms of the analysis. the first part was the citizens arrest. if you don t have a valid
what you said is absolutely right. we need to change the law. what have we been saying throughout this trial? if it was a young black teenager with an ar-15 at a maga rally, even with the laws in the books on wisconsin, the law would not have been, it would not apply equally at all. you know as well as i know, even the self-defense law on the books, that young man would be dead or going to practice on prison right now. we have been talking about this for a long time there feels to be of two senses of justice. at this moment when it fails to appeal the process or change the
the ball on covering this case from the start. right from the start there were a couple of things that were pretty immediately obvious. one was we knew what wisconsin self-defense law was and the other was there was a lot of video evidence out there in the public domain. what the video evidence showed is rittenhouse was being chased before he fired fatal shots, that he was knocked to the ground, that he was attacked before he fired fatal shots. if you knew wisconsin s self-defense law and you knew through the rules around open carrying, you knew he was going to have a strong defense. but what a lot of people did is they took the foolishness of being there, trecklessness of being there in itself, 17-year-old armed with a rifle going to a social unrest, that s ridiculous. 17-year-olds shouldn t be doing that. and they conflated that with all that followed, and that s a big mistake. that s not how juries look at it. juries look at the law. they compare the law to the facts, and under wisc
was pretty apparent from the beginning that he had a strong defense. how much is it about slogans that were a test early on, the slogan about crossing state lines? and how much information about this didn t come out right away, that only came out at trial that then changed the picture? i think trial fleshed it out but there were an awful lot of people who knew the contours of the defense early on. the videos were out there early on. and i think there were media outlets who just did a disservice by not noting rittenhouse was running away. this was somebody not aggressively approaching people, he was running away. even under wisconsin self-defense law, there s some modified versions of a duty to retreat but you would think pursued by the first person he shot very aggressively. these kinds of things were not amplified enough and so that s one of the reasons why i think the verdict took millions of americans by surprise on its own
"This is a sad day for our country when someone can put themselves in harm’s way, declare self defense, and be acquitted," said Roy Dominguez, a defense attorney and former