Whether or not the crying was real, it was a performance, and it had an audience. The debate this week has centered on whether the defendant’s spectacle was authentic. The killings of the demonstrators caused a national shock wave last summer, highlighting the powder keg of emotion surrounding arrests, clashes, and tense exchanges as tens of millions of Americans took to the streets to protest racial injustice. The Illinois teenager faces two counts of first-degree homicide and one of attempted homicide, along with three other charges in the shooting on August 25, 2020, just a couple of nights after a Kenosha police officer shot Black motorist Jacob Blake seven times in the back in front of three of his children. The defendant also testified that he gave a bulletproof vest in his possession - issued by the Grayslake, Illinois, police department’s Explorer program for young people interested in law enforcement careers - to a friend, saying he felt he wouldn’t need it because, he recalled in the courtroom, “I’m going to be helping people.” Earlier that day, he allegedly offered “condolences” to a business owner for cars that were set afire the previous night, and he said that he and a friend agreed to help provide armed protection for the business that night. When he wasn’t crying, Rittenhouse explained why he had traveled the roughly 20 miles from Illinois. ![]() The trial and pretrial proceedings had already sparked a national outcry after Judge Bruce Schroeder decided last month that prosecutors may not refer to Rosenbaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz as “victims,” and that defense attorneys could call them “looters” or “arsonists.” Now with his tears, Rittenhouse has cast himself as the lone victim in his own homicide trial. Sign up to receive our newsletter each Friday. Vox’s German Lopez is here to guide you through the Biden administration’s burst of policymaking. Rittenhouse wasn’t weeping with regret he was claiming self-defense, and recounting how he felt his life was in danger. Rittenhouse’s blubbering was the headline of the day after the defendant offered his much-awaited testimony in the case Wednesday, recalling the night he shot Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber to death and “vaporized” much of the bicep of medic Gaige Grosskreutz, according to Grosskreutz’s testimony. Then came the sobbing, which kept the rest of his response to his attorney’s questioning about that evening from escaping his quivering lips. ![]() Rittenhouse’s eyes shut almost completely, save for an occasional glance to his left in the direction of the jury. What Kyle Rittenhouse displayed in a Kenosha, Wisconsin, courtroom this week as he testified in his homicide trial was what folks like to call an “ugly cry.”Ĭharged in the killings of two men and injury of another amid days of racial justice protests last summer, the defendant started to falter on the stand as he described that fateful night last August, when the then-17-year-old was armed with a rifle, patrolling the streets of a town that was not his own.
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