However hard Jesse Singal tries to spin the outcome of the Rittenhouse trial, using extant state and federal laws, it’s impossible to remove race or class from this situation.
Would a black kid have had supporters who could quickly raise $2m for bail, and an undisclosed amount for a top flight legal defence?
US history does way more than suggest that a 17-year-old black kid with an assault rifle who shot three people, killing two of them, would not only NOT have been cleared on all counts, but would most likely have been incarcerated for decades.
The skin colour of his victims is irrelevant because they were deemed to be left-wing / troublemakers / mentally unstable young men who contributed to their own demise by a) being there with a presumed ill-intent, and b) chasing an armed man.
The fact that Rittenhouse cried and vomited when he turned himself in as logically attributable to the after effects of high levels of adrenaline and fear of what would follow if he were jailed - as it is to remorse.
Those who want to cast Rittenhouse as a Disneyfied, soft-focus, citizen-vigilante, too young to make good judgements, caught up in a terrifying situation and genuinely in fear of his life at the hands of those he saw as the enemy of all he holds dear …. are also logically and ethically obligated to oppose the insanity of laws and a mass popular culture which allows cognitively immature people to legally own, and carry in public, military grade weapons.
A society which has a mass culture that promotes and legitimates the presence of heavily armed citizen-militias, which incarcerates more of its (poor and black) citizens per capita than any other country in its prison-industrial complex, which could house, feed, educate and keep healthy its entire population with the money it wastes on its military-industrial complex.... is a fundamentally flawed society.
The side of US society that Rittenhouse identifies with, sought to protect – the side he inserted himself and his assault rifle into - is also the side that created, and which perpetuates that toxic culture.
I’m of the opinion that he should have been found guilty of manslaughter by virtue of his age, been barred from owning or using a gun for the rest of his life, and been entered into some sort of rehabilitative programme rather than the hell-hole of a US prison - but such a verdict only becomes just if all other neurologically immature US citizens in similar situations, irrespective of race and/or class, could reasonably expect such a response from the courts.
They can’t. And as things stand, they won’t.
And a bit closer to home while we are on the subject of miscarriages of justice – a young man, also aged 17, also white and middle class, who drove a powerful car at speeds of up to 180 kph in city streets, who ran into and killed a 19 -year-old Chinese student, who fled the scene and conspired with his mates to lie to the police about his car having been stolen; who, when dobbed in, expressed racist views and sought to deflect from his culpability by suggesting the young woman should not have been in NZ - was charged with, and pleaded guilty to, manslaughter even though his actions were so reckless they met the criteria for murder. He “used his car as a lethal weapon” and “drove at insane speeds”- the Judge’s words – but got a five year sentence, and was out in under two.
The reason for the charge of manslaughter was he was white, middle class, driving a car, and deemed by the cops to be too young to fully comprehend the consequences of driving in that fashion so no jury would convict him of murder.
Second scenario involves five young brown, poor people, the oldest 17 and youngest 12 - who staged a classic horizontal crime of robbing a pizza delivery man, also ethnically Chinese. They hit him on the head with a baseball bat, robbed him; took him back to his car unaware that he had a brain bleed, and because no one nearby came to his aid or called for help, the poor man died.
Utterly tragic on every level.
But did the police or the courts consider that those young kids might have been incapable of fully understanding the consequences of their actions – especially in a society in which kids are assailed constantly with images of people being bashed on the head with no resulting brain damage or death? Were they that much more culpable than the car driver that their actions constituted murder?
Aggravated robbery – causing bodily harm or death in the commission of a robbery always carries a heavier tariff because our society places such a high value on protection of property.
Causing injury or death by dangerous driving is often treated more lightly because of the high social value our society places the right to drive, a value driven by the lobbyists pushing the huge economic interests of the car and petro-chemical industries. In the neo-liberal era, there is a greater need to drive because of the erosion of public transport and growth of satellite communities.
It was no accident that those kids were Māori and poor. Nor was it an accident that the media talked up the crime shamefully lurid, tub-thumping, amygdala-exciting terms.
Similarly the trial of Lipine Sila. His reckless actions caused immense harm and ended two young lives, but I have no doubt that had Sila been the scion of a white, affluent Christchurch family and his victims been two working class brown girls, the charge would have been manslaughter plus ABH and he would have got a lighter sentence than life with a mandatory non-parole period of 18 years. Nor would we have had the local newspaper covering the prosecution case in terms that eventually drove the judge to order them to tone it down – in time for the defence case.
Rittenhouse is a victim in a sense. He’s a kid who has bought into the American dream and constructed a scenario in which the angry young people drawn to antifa are his enemy, while heavily armed, right-wing militias are his patriotic allies.
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