@Koko #104473
It should be pointed out that Schroeder’s a Democrat appointee.
That means very little. He was appointed in 1984; people change over time. Witness, for example, Arianna Huffington’s change from being “California’s journalistic attack dog of the right” to a staunch left-winger. Or various politicians switching parties. It’s not common, but it happens.
But it’s not his political views which are the issue; the vast majority of liberals don’t get up in hackles over conservative judges who actually do their fucking job even if they don’t always like the outcome. And when one of our own is a garbage human (by liberal standards, anyway), most of us are not at all kind to them either (witness Al Franken, for example). It was his conduct during the trial. For example, he allowed Rittenhouse to “pick” his jury pool (in quotes because it was during the random part of the process so it’s not like there was a meaningful effect on the outcome). No¹ judge does things like this, ever, because it gives the appearance of grotesque lack of impartiality, whether or not it’s true, and given an appearance no one can reasonably trust that it’s not true. It’s a severe breach of ethics.
¹Okay, if you look hard enough, you can find judges being this ungodly stupid. But this is very rare, because most judges don’t want to put their careers in severe danger.
- not allowed the people shot to be referred to as “victims” (this makes sense because if you start the trial with that assumption then Kyle cannot be anything other than guilty, the jury is supposed to make that decision)
You won’t get any disagreement on that point – any more. It has been pointed out by the legally knowledgeable at the very start of the trial that self-defense under US law requires determining whether the situation even was a crime - which is unintuitive to some people, a lot of people with no background in law assume that killing someone is inherently a crime but self-defense “excuses” it (i.e. results in no punishment). Thus if it’s undetermined if any crime took place it’s undetermined if there were any victims, and the court language must reflect that in - again, that’s not how law has to work, and it’s a rather weird approach for some people, so they can be forgiven for not knowing American Law works like this. We can also blame Yahoo News, which for some reason was stupidly harping on this point for way longer than was excusable.
That said:
- allowed to refer to the people shot as “rioters” or “looters” (this makes sense because strictly speaking them being rioters or looters alone would not negate the charges against Kyle)
Judge Schroeder made that call. Some right-wing news sources implied that this is how it works because Judge Schroeder made that call. Yet this is also one of the reasons why he’s very likely to be slapped with a conduct hearing.
Part of the determination whether self-defense applies is determining whether the beliefs of the defendant are “reasonable” from a legal perspective (not necessarily correct; someone can be reasonable but incorrect or unreasonable but correct) and pre-labeling them as “rioters” and “looters” is absolutely discriminatory language towards determining that.
- his ringtone (FYI, Lee Greenwood’s song has millions upon millions of views on YouTube alone, it’s a popular song that doesn’t prove anything)
I had to look up what the hell you were even talking about. I found a whole lot of conservatives giving this as evidence that he was a “true patriot” and that liberals would tear him down over the song itself, and a few liberals saying that not silencing his phone in court was unprofessional, but no mentions of the song itself. This is a conservative strawman, not an actual liberal argument.
- yelling at the prosecution (this has more to do with the prosecution’s misconduct, one could just as easily argue that the judge is biased against Kyle because he didn’t make any ruling on the TWO calls for mistrial with prejudice)
1.) Yelling at anyone is still unprofessional. This ain’t Judge Judy.
2.) In terms of prosecutorial misconduct, I’ll let the actual legal experts chime in on the post-trial analyses for this one, as I haven’t quite gotten around to it yet, but given the circumstances, I strongly suspect that this is a case of “the judge determined this, the judge was being unprofessional and was almost certainly wrong”.
3.) That’s… backwards. You’re confusing that with “mistrial without prejudice”. The defense was calling for a mistrial with prejudice, on the grounds that Judge Schroeder was being a supremely unprofessional asshole who permanently tainted the whole thing to the point where no justice could reasonably be determined in this trial or any future trial. If granted, Rittenhouse would go free, no retrials would be conducted, Judge Schroeder’s career would be severely and immediately endangered. That’s “biased against him” how exactly? And I would point out that the defense would never call for this unless they either believed they had a weak case and were grasping at an opportunity caused by the judge’s misconduct, or they were genuinely appalled at the judge’s behavior. (Or, I suppose, if the defense were themselves being unprofessional assholes, which I doubt happened in this case, but that would open a whole other can of worms if it were true…)
- dismissing the gun charge (this had to be done because the law of Wisconsin as it is written and with all the exceptions that apply does leave room for a minor to carry certain long-barreled firearms
I’ll have to look up the exact text of gun laws in Wisconsin, or maybe it will come up in the legal analyses when I check in with them later, but this smacks of bad-faith argument (as in yes, there are circumstances, but no, they do not meaningfully apply to this situation). Gun laws do not normally have loopholes which allow minors to carry guns around that freely. (I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if Texas did, but you know, Texas.) Regardless, his right to have the gun is of only limited relevancy to the self-defense trial, and were not among the charges being considered… and thus might reasonably have been excluded (not “dismissed”; that has a different legal meaning) by any other judge. Nobody’s complaining about that, or at least not anymore, once most people became aware that there would be a second trial over the gun possession charges.
You: “He had a right to the gun” Us: “nope” You: “you people are using his supposed lack of right to a gun as evidence that he is guilty, but the charges were dismissed so therefore he absolutely had the right to the gun” …is absolutely not what happened, or how things work, and depending on exactly what you were thinking possibly not even why our response was “nope”.