• Kohen Shaw
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    102 years ago

    Yeah, I don’t get it. Was this a case of the US legal system failing that damn hard? They approached this like the guy was spawned in that place with a weapon and just attacked by an angry mob. In reality he went through a bunch of very illegal ( or at least should be illegal ) steps to get himself in the situation.

    Is it legal for a 17 year old to open carry a tool designed to murder people? Then crossing state lines with the tool. Putting himself in a highly charged situation with a weapon. Like wth. They just isolated the shooting and looked specifically at that without considering anything that happened before. Is that the way the US legal system approaches these things? Genuine question.

    • @pingveno
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      2 years ago

      Just to clarify, he did not cross state lines with the gun. He crossed state lines, then was given the gun by someone else. He also had ties to the community, living 20 miles away and with family that live/work in Kenosha.

      In terms of how the legal system views a situation, that depends on the situation and jurisdiction. So a police officer who puts themselves in a dangerous situation then claims to have feared for their life often gets the benefit of the doubt. That is why police officers are so rarely convicted; nothing matters except what they are thinking in the instant they pull the trigger. In other cases, armed citizens have a duty to retreat when possible. Other states have “stand your ground” laws, which allow armed citizens with a Rambo complex to do just that even when retreat is a viable option.

      As I have dug further into this, I can see why the jury came to its verdict. Rittenhouse had attempted to retreat, there were people coming after him, two of them with guns, and he had stumbled. This is a case of four people who should not have been there that night, not of murder nor white supremacy.

      • Kohen Shaw
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        22 years ago

        Thank you for the clarification with the state lines. What breaks my mind is that there is some kind of weird loophole where an under aged person can actually own and use a tool created primarily to kill other people, then they go ahead and kill people ( self defense or not ) and who ever actually owns the weapon ( or who sold it to the minor ) is not responsible for anything. I’ve said it another reply, am not from the US and am not living there either, so this is just the opinion of someone looking from the outside.

        • @pingveno
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          32 years ago

          Dominick Black, the friend of Rittenhouse who sold him the rifle, is still very much on the hook for acting as a straw purchaser for a minor, a felony act. It’s also notable that many of the far-right groups that were there that night are being sued by the family of the deceased for negligence. I’m not sure how that works out from a legal point, since they have a legal right to free assembly.

    • @jedrax
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      2 years ago

      deleted by creator

      • Kohen Shaw
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        22 years ago

        That’s interesting, and weird to me. Am not from the US, so trying to understand the situation. In my home country, how you come in a situation matters very much from a legal point of view. It can attenuate or aggravate your sentence, depending on what happened, no situation is taken completely separate from the circumstances which lead to it. And yes, it can even come down to if the person being judged is educated or not, their background and so on. But then again, there is no jury system, the judge (s) give the verdict so it tends to be all more technical and less based on feelings. I think that’s why I can’t make sense of this in my head, for me it makes more sense to look at the full situation when taking the decision.