America is amazing in a stupefying way. Anywhere else white supremacist Kyle Rittenhouse would be treated as a terrorist for killing two people and injuring one with his gun during a protest in August last year.
Not in America. There he is celebrated as a white vigilante hero, not just in Wisconsin, but all of white America. A jury there on Friday gave one more reason to the American right to celebrate. It found Rittenhouse not guilty of intentional homicide, reckless homicide and attempted intentional homicide.
The acquittal is befuddling. If not the first charge, the second or third should have stuck. Or the other charges Rittenhouse faced: recklessly endangering safety, firing the rifle near others and illegal possession of a dangerous weapon by a minor. Consider the facts. A riot breaks out one August day after an African-American named Jacob Blake is shot by a white police officer.
Rittenhouse, then 17 years old, travels to riot-torn Kenosha with an assault rifle to join other armed men who were acting more as militia than men after peace. The teenager's story as narrated by the defence team is that he was there to defend businesses from being looted.
No owners asked him or the group he was with to help defend their businesses. More importantly, why was Rittenhouse carrying a rifle he was below the legal age to buy? Puzzlingly, the judge dropped the count on illegal possession of a dangerous weapon by a minor.
Arguments can be made, cogent ones even, to show that the prosecution was not good at convincing the jury of its case. Or the defence team was adept at selling their story to the jury. Or the judge — Bruce Schroeder — was "outrageously unorthodox" in the conduct of the trial, as The New York Times put it. Not only was the judge quick to lecture and pose quirky questions to the prosecution, but his frequent and unorthodox admonishments of the state attorney had put him in a bad light. According to The Guardian, at one stage of the trial, Schroeder's phone rang with a song used at former president Donald Trump's rallies. Not a good thing from many angles. Or that jury trials often result in befuddling verdicts like the one on Friday.
What can you expect of 12 laymen untrained in the legal intricacies of criminal law? The law should not impose such a burden on untrained minds. So the arguments go.
But a more convincing argument is that politics has somehow made its way to the American courts. Rittenhouse is white and so were the ones he shot, but the case was paying much attention to racial justice, unequal policing and firearms rights, write Maya Yang and Joanna Walters who covered the case for The Guardian.
No surprise. As the case was progressing through the court, America was a divided nation yet again. It remains divided still. And the division isn't about being on the left or the right. It is more. It is about what it means to be white or black in America.
This isn't an issue for the American jury to decide. It is a question of politics for politicians to resolve. America has to find a way forward. And that way is, as Michael Jackson sang it, one where it doesn't matter whether you are black or white.