Three people, largely innocent, were killed at the hands of armed vigilantes: two trials, with different verdicts. The gunslinging teenager Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted in Kenosha, Wisconsin, for killing two people and seriously injuring a third, by claiming self-defense against assailants who supposedly intended to do him harm. By contrast, the McMichel father and son were convicted in Brunswick, Georgia, of multiple counts of murder for killing the young Black jogger, Ahmaud Arbery, on Feb. 23, 2020. The death amounted to a present-day lynching, even if the lynch mob consisted only of three neighbors concerned with home break-ins and equipped with a shotgun instead of a rope.
Despite the
different outcomes, together the two episodes powerfully refute the myth that a
good guy with a gun is part of the answer to crime and disorder in the streets.
Policing is a demanding profession, best left to trained professionals who
follow use-of-force rules laid down by publicly accountable administrators. With
his military-style rifle, Rittenhouse possibly helped protect the used car lot
from damage during the disorder in Kenosha, but the truth is that Rittenhouse
was responsible for the only deaths during the disorder on the evening of
August 25, 2020, more than a year before his eventual trial.
The two trials differed in multiple
aspects. In Brunswick, Georgia, the experienced prosecutor Linda Dukinoski was
sure-footed in presenting evidence and cross-examining young Travis McMichel in
contrast to the occasional trial errors by assistant district attorney Thomas
Binger in the Kenosha trial. Rittenhouse had the benefit of a two-million-dollar
legal defense financed by a go-fund-me campaign by conservatives and gun rights
partisans that allowed practice trials to rehearse Rittenhouse’s eventual
testimony.
The McMichels and their neighbor,
William “Roddie” Bryan, had no donors to help finance their somewhat meager
defense. To the contrary, once the video of Arbery’s killing surfaced and the
twice-delayed prosecution began, public opinion recognized the killing for what
it was: a lynching that cried out for justice and accountability rather than
celebration and legal impunity for the perpetrators.
The judges in the two cases
differed as well. In Kenosha, Rittenhouse had the benefit of a judge, the
75-year-old Bruce Schroeder, who was clearly partial toward the defense and
perturbed by the prosecution. In Georgia, Judge Timothy Walmsley, called in
from nearby Savannah after the local judges in Glynn County all recused themselves,
presided over the thirteen-day trial evenhandedly with calm and patience.
The death of Ahmaud Arbery began
with racial profiling in its starkest terms. In his phone call to the local
police, Travis McMichel reported “a black man running down the street,” their
street so to speak in this white neighborhood. The father, Gregory McMichel, had
weak grounds at best to initiate a citizen’s arrest of the Black jogger. At a
distance, he could not have identified Arbery as the supposed intruder at the
nearby construction site and could not have known what if anything the intruder
had stolen.
With Rittenhouse’s acquittal fresh in mind,
convictions in Georgia seemed by no means certain despite Travis McMichel’s acknowledgment
on cross-examination that he faced no threat from the unarmed jogger. Their
defense relied weakly in the end on the premise that Arbery’s attempted flight
from two armed white men amounted to proof of his guilt. With all three men
convicted of multiple murder counts, court watchers credited Dukinoski with
carefully downplaying the racial elements of the case for a jury that included
only one Black juror in a county where African Americans comprise about
one-fourth of the population. The McMichels’ defense lawyers had used
peremptory challenges to excuse all of the Black potential jurors even as
Dukinoski objected.
Reacting to
the Nov. 24 verdicts on the PBS NewsHour, Paul Butler, a Black law professor at
Georgetown Law School and a former federal prosecutor, recalled McMichel’s
initial report of “Black man running down the street” as evoking the “American
history of racial violence and white supremacy and unequal justice under the
law.” “You might say,” Butler continued, “that today these jurors disrupted
that history.”
“Criminal
trials are not designed to be instruments of social change,” Butler added. “But
sometimes verdicts reveal something about social progress. Today we learned
that in Glynn County, Georgia, in a trial in which three white men hunted down
and killed a Black man, those men were convicted by a virtually all-white jury.
In this country that counts as progress.”
The
partisan celebration of Rittenhouse’s acquittal, on the other hand, sends a
mixed message about vigilante justice. The Nov. 19 verdict is subject to
reasonable doubt even if the jurors deliberated carefully over four days in
weighing the evidence and applying Wisconsin’s law of self-defense. As the Washington
Post rightly observed, Rittenhouse is “not a hero, but a hapless young man
who armed himself with a gun he shouldn’t have had, foolishly put himself in a
volatile situation where he had no business being, and ended up doing grievous
and irreparable harm.”
More legal
proceedings are still pending. The McMichels and Bryan face the possibility of
life prison sentences for their state court convictions and await likely trial
on federal hate crime charges. Kyle Rittenhouse’s friend, Dominick Black, faces
possible trial in Illinois on charges of intentionally giving a dangerous
weapon to someone under age eighteen, resulting in death.
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