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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35989 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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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.

The Rittenhouse case got many orders of magnitude more coverage and had an order of magnitude fewer victims.

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.

From the conservative perspective

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.

We're splitting hairs at this point, but the fact remains that the US criminal justice system has an established process and standard to decide when people are victims, and the system concluded in this case that Rittenhouse was the victim and these other individuals were not, because that conclusion (to within the standard burden of proof) was required for the outcome that obtained.

No, the fact remains that the a finding that Rittenhouse was the victim and the others were not was NOT required for the outcome. That is literally what it means to say that the state had the burden of proving that he was not acting in self-defense.

Edit: That is why an acquittal on self-defense grounds does not prevent a subsequent civil case against the defendant:

When the first suit is a criminal prosecution resulting in an acquittal, the courts almost unanimously hold that there should be no preclusive effect given the acquittal in a subsequent civil action. A recent case, which arose in Maryland, will serve to illustrate the application of this rule. In United States v. Burns, the government brought an interpleader action to determine the distribution of the proceeds of a National Service Life Insurance policy. The widow of the insured had been acquitted of the murder of her husband on the theory of self-defense. In the interpleader action it was held that the acquittal was not preclusive, and the theory of self-defense which was accepted in the first suit was rejected. Despite the acquittal, the court found that the wife murdered her husband and was not entitled to the insurance proceeds. [¶] Although this result seems unduly harsh and illogical at first glance, there is a valid explanation which justifies it. In criminal actions the burden of proof is "beyond a reasonable doubt," while in civil actions the burden is proof by "a preponderance of the evidence." Therefore, an acquittal in the former action serves to show only that the government did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the crime. This does not mean that the more lenient civil burden of preponderance of the evidence could not have been satisfied. Therefore, a party in a subsequent civil action should not be precluded from attempting to prove an issue by a preponderance of evidence merely because the government did not support the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

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