"In the Michigan Shooting, What Is the School’s Responsibility?"

The NYT asks. 

First, a teacher found Ethan Crumbley searching online for ammunition. The next day, there was an alarming note on his desk: “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” School officials met with Mr. Crumbley, 15, and his parents, informing them that he needed to begin counseling within 48 hours. After his parents resisted bringing him home, administrators allowed him to stay in school....

The parents have been arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter. Isn't the school more  responsible? 

Catherine J. Ross, a law professor at George Washington University and expert on student rights, said she found the school’s reaction “truly astounding.”... If the parents refused to take Mr. Crumbley home, it was the legal and ethical responsibility of the school, Professor Ross said, to “remove the student from the classroom and put them in a safe place — safe for other people and safe for themselves.”

By "put them in a safe place," I think Ross means put Ethan Crumbley in custody. He apparently begged "help me." It sounds as though he struggled with an uncontrollable impulse. I understand the school wanting to defend itself after the fact, but what's more important is for schools to take action to protect the students who are trapped there and endangered by other students. 

This is part of a larger issue of government declining to keep the peace and attempting to convince us that it cannot keep the peace, something I wrote about last month, after the Rittenhouse verdict and the Waukesha massacre, here:

"When is a racial hate crime not a racial hate crime? When it doesn’t advance the left’s, and the Democrats’, narrative."

"When white teenager Kyle Rittenhouse shot three white men who were violently assaulting him, it somehow got treated by the press and politicians as a racial hate crime. President Joe Biden (falsely) called Rittenhouse a white supremacist, and the discussion of his case was so focused on racial issues that many Americans mistakenly thought that the three men Rittenhouse shot were black. But when a black man, Darrell Brooks, with a long history of posting hateful anti-white rhetoric on social media drove a car into a mostly white Christmas parade, killing six people and injuring dozens, the press was eager to wish the story away. (The New York Times buried it on page A22.) Even when a Black Lives Matter activist connected it to the Rittenhouse verdict, observing 'it sounds like the revolution has started,' the media generally downplayed it." 

Writes Glenn Reynolds's column in the NY Post.

"I’m not a racist person. I support the BLM movement. I support peacefully demonstrating. I believe there needs to be change."

"I believe there’s a lot of prosecutorial misconduct, not just in my case but in other cases. It’s just amazing to see how much a prosecutor can take advantage of someone."

ADDED: Here's the full transcript for the interview (which goes beyond what's in that clip). Excerpts:

The government — in failing to maintain order in Kenosha — deserves blame for the Kyle Rittenhouse incident.

Here's something you may have missed. I missed it until today, when I was listening to the new episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily": "The Acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse/How a jury came to find the teenager, who shot and killed two people in Kenosha, Wis., not guilty on the five charges he faced."

The episode covered the entire trial. What jumped out at me wasn't the show's focus, but it mattered to me because I care about what government can do to protect citizens from each other.

None of the shootings by Kyle Rittenhouse would have occurred if Joseph Rosenbaum hadn't behaved in a deranged manner. Presumably, Rosenbaum would have done better if he had taken his medication, but he couldn't get his prescriptions filled because the pharmacy was boarded up — closed, because of the riots.

I'm reading more about his condition — here, in The Washington Post — and I see that the plastic bag he threw at Rittenhouse was a small collection of items — deodorant, underwear, socks — that the hospital had given him when he was discharged after a suicide attempt. That's what he had (and lamely threw at Rittenhouse). What he lacked was his drugs: "Hours after he was released from the hospital, Rosenbaum stopped by a pharmacy in Kenosha to pick up medication for his bipolar disorder, only to discover that it had closed early because of the unrest." 

They released a mentally ill man into a chaotic city with a prescription for medication that he could not fill. A suicidal man proceeded to get himself killed at the hands of Rittenhouse and to unleash the ill-fated rush to stop Rittenhouse. There are immense and unknowable costs to letting a city decline into chaos. 

Rittenhouse and every other individual — except a truly deranged person, such as, perhaps, Rosenbaum — are responsible for his own actions. We tend to focus on the actions of other human beings, and the trial was a spectacle commanding us to focus on Rittenhouse. The government puts on that show, and that show distracts us from the failings of government. 

"Why Didn’t [Wisconsin Governor] Tony Evers Prevent the Carnage in Kenosha?" John McCormack asked (in National Review, while the jury was deliberating):

On the afternoon of Sunday, August 23 — three months after the murder of George Floyd and the riots it sparked — a Kenosha police officer shot African American Jacob Blake. The shooting was far more complicated than initial reports indicated: Blake had a knife, resisted arrest after being tasered, and was reaching into his car when he was shot.... But the video of the incident almost guaranteed that riots would occur without decisive action....

That evening, instead of deploying the National Guard to Kenosha, Evers sent out an inflammatory tweet suggesting that police may have behaved “mercilessly” in their encounter with Blake. “Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin... While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.” 

A few hours later, 100 cars were torched in Kenosha.

It wasn’t until the next morning, August 24, that Evers called out the National Guard — and even then he sent only 125 guardsmen to Kenosha, which has a population of just under 100,000. That night, arsonists set fire to dozens of buildings in the city. On Tuesday, August 25, Evers sent another 125 members of the National Guard. But that evening, the Washington Post reported, law-enforcement agents were “overwhelmed” by rioters and “the only visible law enforcement presence was around the Kenosha County Courthouse, where an 8-foot-high fence was erected around the building, with about 1,000 protesters gathered outside the barrier.” 

Evers had turned down an offer of federal support earlier that day. “I have no regrets because the only thing I said no to was Homeland Security and I knew that would not work out because of what I saw in Portland,” Evers said after the fact. Evers has defended his minimal deployment of guardsmen by saying, “We have fulfilled every request that the leadership in Kenosha have asked for.”....

Evers is at fault and so is the leadership of Kenosha. 

ALSO: More government responsibility for chaos in Wisconsin: "Milwaukee County DA admits it was a mistake to grant $1,000 bail to SUV-driving felon days before he smashed into Xmas parade: Darrell Brooks was freed after running over mother of his child and is now charged with homicide after killing five" (Daily Mail).

"Protesters upset over the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse marched in Kenosha on Sunday — in the presence of a Second Amendment-supporting father-daughter duo armed with AR-15s they said were to protect the demonstrators."

The NY Post reports, with lots of photos of Erick Jordan, 50, and his 16-year-old daughter Jade.

Jordan said he’d been training Jade to use firearms since she was 4 but only let her touch a weapon once she was 14. He said they were protecting a restaurant and two parking lots in the area on the night Rittenhouse shot three people, including two fatally, amid protests over police conduct.

As for the Rittenhouse verdict, Mr. Jordan said: "It is what it is. The jury did their job, and this is America."

ADDED: Did Erick and Jade Jordan smoke out any hypocrites? 

Who needs rational argument when you've got hashtags?

Systemic oppression is evil and destroys the world #Rittenhouse

— Lady Gaga (@ladygaga) November 20, 2021

I mean, I could just as well tweet: Brainlessness is ruining everything #LadyGaga 

Or: Logic leaps R Us #hashtags

Tulsi goes big.

 

"The jury got it right—finding Rittenhouse not guilty on all charges. The fact that charges were brought before any serious investigation is evidence that the government was motivated by politics, which itself should be considered criminal."

ADDED: Gabbard has quite a different view of the Ahmaud Arbery case:

Did Joe Biden get angry over the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse? And did he refuse to take back his baseless assertion that Kyle Rittenhouse is a "white supremacist"?

I'm seeing headlines to that effect — for example, "Kyle Rittenhouse: Biden angry after teen cleared of shootings" (BBC). Biden spent part of yesterday morning under sedation, getting a colonoscopy, but he was back in the world of the conscious by the time the verdict came out, able to hear the news and fly into a seething rage or whatever happened that got reported as anger.

First, let's look at the video. Video was important in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, and it's important now as we judge the emotional state of our President:

He's asked for a reaction to the verdict, which he says he just heard, and his first words were exactly what a calm, rational person would say if he didn't watch the trial: "I didn't watch the trial." The reporter loads in a challenge: "Do you stand by your past comment" accusing Kyle Rittenhouse of "white supremacy"?

Biden is cautious: "Well, look, I stand by what the jury concluded. The jury system works, and we have to abide by it." That is absolutely not anger. He's not losing his cool in the slightest, and he simply ignores the problem of his ignorant remark about white supremacy. And that's the end of it. Immediately, there's another question on another topic (his health). 

Second, there's a "Statement by President Biden" at the White House website. Here's the whole thing, and I've put the anger material in boldface:

"Rittenhouse Jury Is Said to Reach a Decision" ... NOT GUILTY on all counts.

The NYT reports. 

"Fearing violence, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers sent the National Guard in to Kenosha in advance of the jury verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case."

"Wise enough — except that, if he’d had the guard out in force as soon as the riots started last year, there probably wouldn’t be a trial now. That is: If Kenosha hadn’t descended into chaos, the chances of such a deadly encounter ever happening would have been much diminished. Two lives wouldn’t have been ended, and Rittenhouse would still be just another basically normal kid.... Rioting attracts trouble-makers, whether Antifa goons or militia loons. In the chaos, even sane people can go mad.... Joe Biden last year called Rittenhouse a 'white supremacist'; no one’s ever shown the least evidence of that.... But Biden, and all the others who’ve polarized this case, saw some value in fueling the flames."

Writes the New York Post Editorial Board in "The real lesson of the Rittenhouse trial: Riots guarantee death and ruined lives."

"Great analogy" says the top-rated comment on a WaPo column that makes a terrible analogy.

I hesitate to link to it because I don't think this writer should be encouraged, but I'll give you the link with the headline and tell you that the piece is intended to be a satire about Kyle Rittenhouse so you can understand my point without actually clicking. The piece is "Teen who showed up in operating room with scalpel had idolized doctors all his life." The author's name is in the tags.

"Overcharging may please the public, but it can demolish a case. While jurors can convict on 'lesser included' offenses..."

"... the credibility of the prosecution is established by the lead charge. Jurors tend to start at the top and work their way down on the charges. If the first-degree charge is wildly out of reach, they are more likely to doubt the lesser charges, too. Even with some lesser included offenses, it will be hard for prosecutors in the Rittenhouse case to make this cat walk backward. They promised the jury that it would see a vigilante rampaging in utter disregard of human life. Instead, the jury saw a much more confusing, chaotic scene in which Rittenhouse was threatened with a gun, hit repeatedly and chased down a street."

Writes Jonathan Turley in "Rittenhouse trial: Perils of weighing public opinion over evidence" (The Hill).

Is "make this cat walk backward" an idiomatic expression? Google returns only 4 results on this search, one of which is the article I've quoted above. The other 3 — 1, 2, 3 — are all from July 2014, and they are all reports of a quote — on the topic of whether members of Congress can sue the President for violating separation of powers — that came from Jonathan Turley.

"Make this cat walk backward" seems related to the expression that it's hard/impossible to "herd cats." I guess it's hard to make a cat do anything, so make up your own cat expression and try — like Jonathan Turley — to get your idea to go viral. 

What can the prosecution do to make the metaphorical cat walk backward? Find a metaphorical Roomba:

ADDED: As many commenters here are saying, you will find non-Turley examples of the phrase "walk the cat back." To walk back isn't the same as to walk backward. When you go out for a walk, in the end, you walk back home. That doesn't mean backward! 

Here are the Everly Brothers, and I assure you that they are not imploring the woman to walk backwards, just to walk — in a frontward-facing position — back to them:

Here's a Phrase Finder piece on "Walk the cat back." It begins with a usage by Maureen Dowd (in 2010) that seems to be a misunderstanding of the phrase "walk back the cat." If you think there's no significant difference between those 2 phrases, read that piece. "Walking Back the Cat" was the title of a 1997 spy thriller by Robert Littell who explained it as an expression used by spies to mean "attempting to retrace a process to its origin, when that process had been tentative and indirect in the first place." 

Live-streaming the Rittenhouse trial.

"It was a Razzie-worthy performance in my view, but I’m not the target audience for this sick show."

Writes Ja'han Jones, in "Kyle Rittenhouse’s white crocodile tears hold value in America/The man charged with homicide in the deaths of two anti-police brutality protesters put on quite the show for a nearly all-white jury this week" by  (MSNBC).

The Rittenhouse murder trial is being prosecuted in front of a nearly all-white jury, before a white judge who uses conservative lingo to describe protesters, in a country where white vigilantism is often excused, if not worshipped. In that context, Rittenhouse’s tears, real or not, have tremendous value. There’s a type of person who is vulnerable to emotional appeals from violent white men, and Rittenhouse’s attorneys only need one of 12 jurors to fit the profile to win this case.... 

From the outset, the Rittenhouse murder trial has been theater, with a cast of characters who are seemingly meant to vindicate conservatives’ violent hero worship. Rittenhouse’s waterworks were an essential part of the act, painting him as a reluctant killer instead of a boastful one. His acquittal would set a dangerous precedent, but it could be the finale we’re headed toward. 

Prepare yourself for much more of that. The media are not going to help preserve the peace if Kyle Rittenhouse is acquitted (or the judge grants the motion for a mistrial with prejudice).

I watched in real time as Rittenhouse broke down and cried, and I said:

"Then we hit the 'My Cousin Vinny' point in the cross. For those of you who are sadly unfamiliar with the best law-themed movie ever produced..."

"... two young men find themselves mistaken for murderers. When told by police that they are suspected of having killed someone, one of the men bursts out, in question form, 'I killed someone?' This would later be read in court as if it were a statement of confession, rather than an outburst of bewilderment. In this real-life trial, it turns out that someone had accused Kyle to his face, on the street, of having pointed a gun at him. Knowing that he’d never done that, Kyle responded sarcastically, 'Yeah, I pointed a gun at you,' and immediately turned around and walked away from a situation that could have been escalated. Now, in court, Binder presented this sarcastic remark as if it were a statement of fact, and characterized Kyle’s denial of the statement being made seriously as a lie."

From "Rittenhouse Trial Day 7: Kyle Survives Abusive Cross-Examination" by Andrew Branca (Legal Insurrection)(video of this portion of the trial at the link).

"On the stand, Kyle Rittenhouse begins to sob loudly as he describes how he was 'cornered' in a parking lot by Joseph Rosenbaum, the first man that he shot and killed."

"Wendy Rittenhouse, his mother, is crying from the gallery. The judge calls for a recess."

Writes Julie Bosman live-blogging the trial in the NYT.

EARLIER: At the same link, Mitch Smith analyzed whether it would be in Rittenhouse's interest to testify:

By taking the witness stand, Kyle Rittenhouse could look jurors in the eyes and try to convince them that he was scared for his life before he shot three men last summer in Kenosha, Wis. But doing so would also open himself up to a grilling by prosecutors, who are likely to accuse him of stirring up trouble and opening fire without reasonable fear that he would be killed or badly hurt.

He didn't merely look the jurors in the eye and try to convince them, he seemed to relive the experience and to be overtaken with trauma, crying in a way that could not be faked. It was very real and convincing that he is suffering. One might attempt to argue that he feels sorry for himself, and he was reliving the horrible moment his life went to hell, and the men he killed are not alive to cry and win our sympathy, but I think his show of emotion will impress at least one juror that he felt truly cornered.

AND: Here's video of today's testimony. Scroll to the parts where the judge is talking (scroll to 1:21:00 to catch the judge's fiery attack on the prosecutor). 

UPDATE: The video was a live stream, and it became unavailable at the close of the day. Here's one highlight:

"The prosecutor with his head in his hand near the end here is just brutal."

The prosecutor with his head in his hand near the end here is just brutal. https://t.co/jpghuE5SVS

— AG (@AGHamilton29) November 8, 2021

"Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse’s new merchandise site signals ‘new era’ of criminal defense."

WaPo headline. From the article:

Jeff Neslund, a Chicago-based civil rights attorney and a former prosecutor with the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, said the website “is dangerous for prosecutors” attempting to secure a conviction in the pending trial, because it has the potential to taint a jury pool. 

“You’re going to have a lot of people who want to be on this jury to help this kid because they have an agenda, so prosecutors will have a tougher time to do their homework to flush those people out,” he said. “But if someone says they never saw the website, what are you going to do? Check their browser history?” 

[John Pierce, a Los Angeles-based attorney for Rittenhouse] Pierce defended the site, saying “the notion of a fair trial was blown out of the water” when celebrities and political figures used the case to portray Rittenhouse “as a mass murderer and white supremacist.” 

“All we are doing is defending his reputation and telling the truth,” Pierce said. “He has a constitutional right to that. There’s nothing wrong or inappropriate to it.”

If you click on the link to the website — which WaPo provides — you don't get to what I'd call a "merchandise site." It looks like a somber presentation of the facts of the case. It does have links across the top of that page and one of them is labeled "store." If you click on that, you get to a page that says, "We're making some adjustments." According to WaPo, the website had "more than 30 apparel items and accessories emblazoned with the logo 'Free Kyle' and a slogan, 'Self-defense is a right, not a privilege.'"

A highly rated comment over there is: "Imagine what would have happened if ISIS had opened a store to celebrate its murders. The victims should swoop down NOW and grab every blood-soaked penny. This act in support of terrorism is an outrage."

"Kyle Rittenhouse was released from jail in Wisconsin on Friday afternoon after his attorneys posted $2 million bail..."

"... setting the teenager free as he awaits trial for fatally shooting two men and wounding a third during summer protests in Kenosha, police said. His release came over the objections of family members and lawyers for two of the men he shot. They had asked for higher bail and voiced concerns Rittenhouse would flee, which his lawyers have said he would not. The 17-year-old’s release was funded by donations sought by his attorneys, who appealed to the political right, where Rittenhouse is popular. Those lawyers also are seeking to overturn Democratic President-elect Joe Biden’s victory."

The Chicago Tribune reports.

"The firearm never crossed state lines. That is a legal firearm in the state of Wisconsin. Wisconsin is an open carry state. That charge is incorrect as a matter of state law."

"He was in imminent danger of serious bodily harm or death. This is 100% self-defense.... They began screaming that Kyle needed to be killed and they were going to kill him. They started relentlessly hunting him as prey as he ran down the street attempting to retreat. As he ran out of room to retreat, shots were fired from behind him. He fired and disarmed the individual, hitting him in the arm. He shot and killed the other person who was attacking him. And I got to tell you... in this war zone, in this chaos that is occurring in this city in America in the middle of Wisconsin... the only individuals that Kyle shot were the three individuals that were attacking him and putting him at risk of serious bodily harm or death. This is a 17-year-old kid... This is amazing... That man survived. That man has not been charged. He came at a 17-year-old with a gun. Why has he not been charged?... [W]here are the charges for aggravated assault against Kyle Rittenhouse... and where are the charges against the people who are funding this activity and who are financing it?"

Said John Pierce, the lawyer for Kyle Rittenhouse (Real Clear Politics).