Last week I said that the Kyle Rittenhouse trial wasn’t going well for the prosecution. Since then, Rittenhouse testified in his own defense without any serious missteps, and a minor gun charge against him was dismissed. His self-defense arguments are still generally strong.
But I wouldn’t bet on a full acquittal with complete confidence. There’s a wide buffet of options available to the jury if it wants to convict, a single dissenter can hang the jury and set the stage for a retrial, and the prosecution has made a late-in-the-game effort to advance a theory that Rittenhouse provoked his first assailant and thus forfeited his privilege of self-defense.
Continue reading the entire piece here at National Review Online
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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