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Notes -
The trial of Darrell Brooks is set to start this coming Monday, October 3. Brooks is accused of running over 77 people at the Waukesha Christmas Parade.
Brooks will be representing himself. His motion to do so was granted today. There have been a few entertaining / exasperating videos of Brooks and the Judge going back and forth on this matter.
Brooks believes himself to be a sovereign citizen. In one of the videos he's crossed out the words "I understand" and replaced them with "I have been informed of." These were on a form he had to sign that warned him of the perils of self-representation. It turns out this is a sovereign citizen thing. They believe that to say "I understand" means that they "stand under" the court and are subject to its authority. In the video granting his motion the judge finds that "I have been informed of" is functionally equivalent to "I understand" and Brooks objects, saying he never said those words.
Culture war angle: this was a big culture war story last year as people perceived the attack as both under-covered and when it was covered, downplayed. The Rittenhouse case got many orders of magnitude more coverage and had an order of magnitude fewer victims.
Additionally, on the videos I discovered that YouTube tacks on a link to the sovereign citizen movement page on Wikipedia, giving it the same treatment as COVID-19 misinformation.
Indeed--there was only one victim, and he didn't even die!
One fascinating aspect of the sovereign citizen "movement" is that, while it is certainly fringe, it's wildly all over place in terms of "nearest point of more mainstream thought." You get people that would otherwise be considered extreme libertarians, extreme leftists, extreme traditionalists, whatever, that have all decided to pick up this particular collection of unusual beliefs. One example is the Moorish sovereign citizens, if you prefer the black-separatist flavor.
Am I misremembering or are you speaking figuratively? Didn't Rittenhouse kill 2 and wound one?
Kyle Rittenhouse was the victim of repeated attempts to murder him. Two of the people who tried to kill him died as a result of his exemplary self-defense (and a third was wounded). Referring to his attackers as "victims" is a wee bit obscene, which is why I didn't assume that's what the OP meant. I may have tried for some cleverness in my phrasing, but I meant precisely what I said, exactly not figuratively.
Yes, if I had read closely I maybe would have figured it out.
Discussing "the case" though, I had already read victim descriptively, meaning simply "those the court decided were victims" because that's how the word is used. (You allude to this when you note a different, objective-morals sense of victim).
Thanks for the clarification
The court did not decide that any of that. This was a jury trial, so the court was not making determination here. Instead, it was the prosecution who claimed that those killed by Rittenhouse were victims. The jury unanimously rejected that.
You're right, my brain was thinking "those the state decided were victims" and I ignored the shades of nuance within the state.
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