After three days of deliberations, the five men and seven women serving as jurors in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse have found him not guilty on all counts, including first-degree homicide. The verdict was announced shortly after noon on Friday, Nov. 19.
Rittenhouse had turned himself in after the Aug. 25, 2020 shooting deaths of two assailants during riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rittenhouse, who was 17 years old at the time, also wounded a third attacker.
The case received much attention and was widely politicized. In the run up to the 2020 Presidential Election, then-candidate Joe Biden tweeted a 50 second clip cut from a debate between former President Donald Trump and himself, where he claimed “There’s no other way to put it: the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night.”
Included in the footage Biden presented to the public were clips from the “Very Fine People Hoax” and Kyle Rittenhouse.
After Rittenhouse testified during his trial, his mother, Wendy, spoke out about now-President Biden’s characterization of her son during a Nov. 11 interview with Fox News, “When I saw that I was shocked, I was angry. President Biden don’t [sic] know my son whatsoever, and he’s not a White supremacist. He’s not a racist. And [Biden] did that for the votes. And I was so angry for a while at him and what he did to my son, he defamed him.”
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The Chicago Tribune reported that prosecutor Thomas Binger acknowledged that “The jury has represented our community in this trial and has spoken.”
