“You lose the right to self-defense when you’re the one who brought the gun, when you are the one creating the danger, when you’re the one provoking other people,” Binger added.īut the jury ultimately sided with Rittenhouse in the trial. “I don’t know how they came to the final conclusion that he’s innocent,” Justin Blake, Jacob’s uncle, said outside the courthouse, “but this is why African Americans say the whole damn system is guilty.” Rittenhouse, then 17, claimed he went from his home in Antioch, Illinois, to Kenosha in August 2020 to “protect” private property from protesters following the shooting of Jacob Blake, who is Black, by white police officer Rusten Sheskey. “My heart still breaks for the communities and families whose grief now compounds, and the countless others who will be denied and deprived in similar scenes across the country.” “What we are witnessing is a system functioning as designed and protecting those it was designed for,” tweeted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While Republicans like Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Madison Cawthorn applauded the jury’s decision, there were other politicians appalled. The verdict, which found Rittenhouse not guilty on homicide and reckless endangerment charges that could have put him in prison for life, capped a heated trial that put issues of race and vigilante justice in America on the stand. Kyle Rittenhouse, the Illinois 18-year-old who became a right-wing cause célèbre after he shot and killed two protesters and wounded a third amid civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year, was acquitted Friday on all counts.
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