First, thank you Tee Em and Jordan for commenting.

For some reason, Medium’s system won’t allow me to reply to each of your comments separately, so I will do so collectively here.

I have bought, ridden and been hit by skateboards. Used the wrong way, I suppose it could be used to kill someone. So could a pen, a coat hanger, or a hand towel. Any ordinary item can become a weapon. But you’re telling me that the brandishing of one of these items reasonably justifies a response with an AK-47? Congrats on finding a single instance of someone dying from a skateboard. Shall we now talk about the stats re items — like AK47s — which have only one purpose, namely, to kill.

And as I said, that is not the fact that the self-defense claim should turn on anyway. Rather, Rittenhouse traveled a good distance with the gun to a gathering he knew was volatile. The law overflows with examples of the self-defense claim being rejected when the assailant welcomes or initiates the situation. As far as I’m concerned, the mother who drove Rittenhouse should be on trial along with — or maybe even instead of — Rittenhouse.

And both your and my arguments will be irrelevant in this particular courtroom. Since our last exchange, the judge has had two grandfatherly moments with Rittenhouse, the whispering to him of words the rest of the participants were not privy to and allowing Rittenhouse to pick his own jurors in lottery form. In my 45 years of practicing trial law, I never saw or heard of such a thing. Moreover, the judge’s failure to read, much less scrutinize, the jury instructions which even he has admitted was irresponsible goes beyond anything I’ve seen. The judge’s bias is beyond question, and if it does not show up before then, it will show up in the sentencing stage. One of the big problems for lawyers generally is that there is, as a practical matter, no way to get judges whose faculties have declined off the bench. Very few people vote in judicial elections, and if the lawyer takes the judge to the Judicial Commission (made up of judges), he/she runs into the good old boy blockade.

None of the arguments I have made here are political or ad hominem. But with respect to your complaint in that regard, I will say that sometimes the person IS the heart of the argument.