Although our legal system finally worked as designed with Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal for shooting at four assailants, our society cannot move forward without condign legal and/or public relations consequences for everybody involved. This case underscores an extremely dangerous practice, which dates back to the Salem witch trials if not before, of putting people on trial to pander to lynch mobs or their equivalents. Prosecutors, especially those with political ambitions, will latch on to socially popular issues such as fear of witches in the seventeenth century or sex crimes and racially-charged controversies today. Examples include:
- The Amirault sexual abuse case ruined people’s lives on the basis of, among other things, “evidence” involving sinister robots, “magic rooms,” and “secret rooms,” none of which were ever found, and sexual abuse with a butcher knife that somehow inflicted no injuries. The case was prosecuted by Scott Harshbarger (D-MA), and Martha Coakley (D-MA) later lobbied to keep the Amiraults in prison. Harshbarger was nonetheless elected President of the Massachusetts Association of District Attorneys and given an award by the ABA for “outstanding work in Juvenile Justice” if that is what the ABA calls the Amirault prosecutions.
- Janet Reno (D-FL) got police officer Grant Snowden sent to prison on spurious child abuse charges, only to have the conviction overturned.
- Mike Nifong (D-NC) was disbarred for his conduct in the Duke Lacrosse case.
- Prosecutors charged a man for shooting another man who is on video reaching through his car’s window to grab his steering wheel and punch him during a Black Lives Matter demonstration.
If they can do this to Rittenhouse, the Amiraults, Grant Snowden, the Duke Lacrosse players, and countless others, then they can do it to you and me. This is why there needs to be social consequences for prosecutorial overreach even if the overreach does not violate the ABA’s Rules of Professional Conduct.
I can no more read the minds of Rittenhouse prosecutors Thomas Binger (D-WI) and James Kraus than Kyle Rittenhouse could read the minds of his assailants, as Binger and Kraus apparently think he should have done. I cannot therefore state as a fact that they filed the case for political reasons. This is only my opinion based on what I read (the probable cause document and the prosecution’s side of the story as told in court) and saw (the videos). The four corners of Deputy Attorney General Angelina Gabriele’s probable cause document stipulates that the three men whom Rittenhouse shot were all the initial aggressors, and pursued him when he attempted to retreat. Binger and Kraus therefore walked into the courtroom with diddly squat and, when the judge threw out the misdemeanor gun possession charge, that was the end of diddly. It is very disturbing, however, that the jury needed more than ten minutes to similarly get rid of squat.
Attorneys’ behavior must be blatantly egregious to transgress the Rules of Professional Conduct, although Nifong and Fina managed to step over that line. This is why prosecutors feel free to compel people to spend their life savings to defend themselves against junk charges and maybe even destroy their lives in the process. The Amiraults were not exonerated despite a judge’s serious reservations about the evidence used against them.
Society can nonetheless impose nonviolent and lawful consequences on the individuals in question. If I ever, as a juror, hear a case in which you are a district attorney’s office, or a civil plaintiff or defendant, and you are represented by Binger or Kraus, I will assume right out of the starting gate that your counsel is going to lie to me. “Lying” includes for the purposes this discussion literal truths or partial truths told with the intent to deceive.
We need to rid the land of all leftist prosecutors and politicians before it’s too late.
Some foul Leftist legal organization will give Binger an award.