Kyle Rittennhouse is...

PS I want to hear what you think, not what you think the jury will decide.

@freemo for me I think it’s kinda sus he just went into the chaos when it wasn’t even in his city. I am not really sure what happened but if there were no direct threat to him then yeah he is guilty. Again I want to précise I am really uninformed on this thing. But yeah, don’t go play the though guys or the cops and go in a dangerous place should be a common sense rule. You’re not equipped nor formed to deal with it (cops should be formed more, but that’s another story), this isn’t cod

@louisrcouture Some would say its suspect that he walked into a dangerous area with the intent of providing first aide and protecting people... I say its what redeems him.

As for a direct threat to him. He didnt shoot at first. A mob started to chase him screaming things about killing him and beating him up, he ran and didnt shoot back instead screaming "friendly friendly friendly" as objects were thrown at him by people chasing him. At every point he only shoots once he has been cornered and is within arms reach of physical assault. Even then one shot and ran, he didnt just start shooting a crowd or anything. At one point a gun was even held to his face showing the crowd was also at least partly armed.

Its a very clear case of self-defense IMO.

@louisrcouture it helps to also hear the testimony to fill in the details mind you. But I think the bulk of it is clear enough on the video.

@louisrcouture there seem to be a few videos on that link. Which one do you wnat me to watch and at what time-point should i pay attention for whatever relevant detail you are trying to share?

@louisrcouture I think i am clearly missing whatever your trying to highlight. The middle one is simply him interacting with police who praised him for being there and giving him some water. It doesnt even have any violence in it or protesters.

@freemo the police tells him to stay away, that he is a civilian etc, he’s trying to confront them then we hear a gunshot

@louisrcouture They arent telling him to disperse, you can clearly hear the difference between the cop in the distance (addressing a crowd out of camera) telling them to disperse, and the cops that address him which are much clearer, louder and closer. When they are addressing him the cop says "We appreciate you guys, we really do". In fact the argument in court is that the police actually deputized him by explicitly condoning them. They were **not** telling them to disperse.

Likewise the gunshot you heard was in the distance.

You can read more about it at the link below here is a quote:

"Police in Wisconsin "deputized" armed vigilantes during protests against police violence last year, including Kyle Rittenhouse..."

and later int he article (naming a victim from the shooting by name):

In the suit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, who was shot in his right arm by Rittenhouse, alleges that Kenosha officials enabled a "band of white nationalist vigilantes" during a protest in Kenosha on Aug. 25, 2020.

nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wisco

@freemo
Speaks for itself
People who arrested dont say they pointed their gun at people sarcastically

In the video, a man wearing yellow pants tells Rittenhouse that the teenager had just pointed a gun at him for standing on a vehicle. Rittenhouse responds in the video, "Yeah I did."
In court, he testified that he had not actually pointed his weapon at the man and said his admission on video was "sarcasm."

cnn.com/2021/11/10/us/kyle-rit

@louisrcouture clicked the link, I dont see the video you are talking about. Where is the video?

Was the person whom he supposidly pointed the gun at one of the people shot or is he unrelated to the case at all?

@louisrcouture For that matter was the car he was standing on his own property? Destruction of property (such as standing on someones car with the intent to damage it) is a perfectly acceptable reason to aim a gun at someone anyway. If you are actively destroying someones property you foreit your rights, you get a gun pointed at you and if you dont stop you might even get shot... Moral of the story, dont destroy property that isnt yours intentionally, if you do expect it to be defended.

@freemo @louisrcouture I think it's perfectly fine to destroy your own property. If you see someone destroying an object that doesn't belong to you, how can you be certain enough that the destroyer doesn't own the object?

@robryk

Sure. The liability is with the person defending it. If you shoot someone destroying their own property then expect to go to jail for shooting an innocent person. If you, however shoot (or threaten to shoot) someone who is destroying someone elses property, and that is true, you are good.

@louisrcouture

@freemo @louisrcouture That interpretation makes injuring-someone-without-a-valid-justification effectively a strict liability crime. This is something that's usually strongly avoided in definitions of any serious crimes (with some infamous exceptions, like felony murder in USA). Even in (some) countries where the self defense justification requires the original attack to be real (and not just the defender to reasonably believe it is real) there is a different "mistaken belief" justification (if you perform an act that is normally a crime, you believe it's justified due to some other legal justification, and you are wrong, your act is not a crime). I know that this is the case in Polish criminal law.

Do you know if mistaken self defense is a valid justification in other jurisdictions?

@robryk

The point im making is, you are right, if you shoot someone for destroying property you better be certain it isnt his property or else you will face jail time.

It doesnt, however, meanyou can never shoot anyone for destroying property even when you know for a fact it isnt his.

@louisrcouture

@freemo @louisrcouture Many jurisdictions go to great lengths to not have any serious strict liability crimes, because in general they create situations where a reasonably person who knows the law might commit a crime without being aware that they're committing a crime. I believe that this is why mistaken self defense is (at least in some places) also a valid justification. You are proposing an expanded (compared to e.g. the one from Poland) notion of self defense that is OTOH narrower on the intent side (mistaken belief is not enough to invoke the justification). I don't really see why _in this particular situation_ strict liability-like semantics are bad, but I do buy that they should be used as rarely as possible. Thus I wonder if any jurisdiction you know of doesn't excuse mistaken self defense.

@robryk

I'm not a lawyer, so I really dont have an answer for you sorry.

@louisrcouture

@freemo @louisrcouture I realized why it's important that mistaken self defense be a valid justification. If someone pretends to attack you with a realistic looking but harmless replica of a weapon you believe that you are in danger, but in fact you aren't. If defending oneself in such situations was not justified, self defense justification would be mostly useless.

I assume that in your proposed world this would still be the case. You also said that defending against property destruction where you are mistaken about its ownership and thus mistaken about legality of the destruction would not be justifiable. Where would you draw the distinction between mistakes that leave the justification valid and ones that invalidate it?

@robryk @freemo @louisrcouture That's why lookalike firearms are illegal too in the Netherlands.
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@frank87 @louisrcouture @freemo

A person who threatens you with a fake gun is already doing something illegal (issuing an illegal threat); I don't see how it matters whether they're doing one or two different illegal things. Without the mistake justification harming such a person would still be a crime: for the self defense justification (in the countries I know about) the action you're defending yourself about has to both be illegal, and a real threat (as opposed to a threat you perceive as real).

@robryk @louisrcouture @freemo Fake guns can be used like real guns, to rob people.
But this is a weakness in the idea of solving crime with arms control: a lot of tools can be used as a weapon.

@frank87 @louisrcouture @freemo Sure. I'm sorry, I don't see what you are responding to. Can you be more verbose?

@robryk @louisrcouture @freemo You're asking about why fake guns are illegal, while threatening is illegal.
It's just like real guns: they are illegal because their sole purpose is illegal (shooting/threatening people)

@frank87 @louisrcouture @freemo Ah, no, I didn't want to ask why they are illegal. I wanted to say that legality of fake guns doesn't matter when determining if self defense against a fake gun is justified according to the law. TTBOMK in CH and PL self-defense would be legal against a fake gun regardless of whether possession of such a fake gun were legal. If we abandoned the mistake justification, it would be illegal regardless of the gun's legality.

@robryk @louisrcouture @freemo I was supporting your statement by mentioning the law has problems with fake guns too.
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