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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?
I would venture that he's denying victim status to the two people Rittenhouse killed and the third he wounded - Rittenhouse being the victim. From the conservative perspective, they were aggressors who happened to aggress someone holding a loaded weapon.
Well, also from the jury's own unanimous perspective, and therefore from the perspective of the criminal justice system.
Let's not overstate what a jury verdict means. The jury was instructed that "The burden is on the state to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not act lawfully in self defense. And, you must be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt from all the evidence in the case that the circumstances of the defendant's conduct showed utter disregard for human life."
It is standard that the state has the burden of proving that a defendant did NOT act in self-defense. So, any acquittal on self-defense grounds says little about what the jury thought of the defendant, and certainly is not an indication that they decided that he was the "real victim" nor that the decedent was the "real bad guy." And, it is certainly possible for both sides to be acting in reasonable self-defense; had Rittenhouse been killed by one of those whom he shot, his killer probably also would have been acquitted. But that would not mean that the jury decided that that killer was the "real victim" and that Rittenhouse was in the wrong.
I believe this is a slight simplification. After all, claiming self-defense is relatively rare. Given an altercation without video or additional witnesses, how could you ever convict someone who just claimed self-defense? I think that there is some (relatively minor, but still existent) hurdle the defendant has to pass before being allowed to claim self-defense, and only then does "reasonable doubt" apply.
Yes, there has to be some evidence of self-defense in order to get the issue before the jury. That can be the defendant's own testimony, but the jury of course can decline to believe the defendant. If they don't believe him, then that is enough to convict. The People have proven their case by convincing the jury that the defendant is lying.
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