Two Racially Inflamed Murder Cases Challenge Our Sense of Racial Progress
In general, according to Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, “the ability to perform a citizen’s arrest is the same for a regular person as it is for a police officer without a warrant.”
The obvious problem, legal experts point out, is that citizen’s arrest laws as they are understood — and misunderstood — in the real world can morph quickly into such abuses as racial profiling and the vigilantism on trial in the Kenosha case of Kyle Rittenhouse.
Rittenhouse was charged with five counts, including homicide and attempted homicide, after shooting three people in August 2020 amid the unrest that gripped Kenosha following a police shooting.
Age 17 at the time, Rittenhouse fatally shot 36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum and 26-year-old Anthony Huber and wounded Gaige Grosskreutz, who was 26. Rittenhouse pleaded not guilty and said he acted in self-defense after being attacked by people who tried to take his gun.
Prosecutors say Rittenhouse, openly carrying an AR-15 military-style rifle, was a violent aggressor who acted recklessly. But video of the event, appears to show that the young gunman had reasons to fear for his safety, first from a mentally unhinged man chasing him and later from a crowd angered by the shooting.
As a believer in justice and fairness, I don’t envy the jurors in this case. Although all of the parties in this tragic episode were white, it occurred amid the chaos of a riot sparked by the lack of charges against the police officer in the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man who survived with serious injuries.
But in the foreground, we have a young man who may have been a sort of “crisis tourist,” as some have called him, but plainly was misled in believing he was doing the right thing by leaving his Illinois home to “help protect” people and property in Kenosha.
No matter which narrative we prefer in this case, the unsatisfying lesson is this: Foolish decisions lead to bad outcomes.
========
(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
©2021 Clarence Page. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
(c) 2021 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
