Rittenhouse posing with officially designated terrorists, the judge says this isn't relevant.

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image showing Rittenhouse posing with officially designated terrorists, the judge says this isn't relevant.

ttalber on November 12nd, 2021 at 10:17 UTC »

That's correct, in the court of law it is not. For the same reason the defense is not allowed to attack the character of the people he shot in self defense. The defense is not allowed to talk about their lives as criminals, in order to sway the jury to believe that they deserved it/had a history of violence.

Objection_Leading on November 12nd, 2021 at 14:43 UTC »

Our criminal justice system was designed with principles that err on the side of innocence. Many of those principles, such as the presumption of innocence and the State’s burden to prove a charge beyond a reasonable doubt, are rooted in English common law. English jurist Sir William Blackstone discussed the driving purpose of such protective principles in his “Commentaries on the Laws of England,” in which he expressed his famous ratio stating, “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

Basically, our system is supposed to be designed such that some guilty people will go free in order to have a system that is less likely to result in false convictions. One of the evidentiary principals that is meant to prevent convictions for the wrong reasons is a general bar against the admission of evidence of a defendant’s prior bad acts. Prior bad acts cannot be admitted for the sole purpose of showing that a defendant has a general “propensity” for committing a crime or crime in general. Prior bad acts can be admitted for numerous reasons, but never to prove a defendant’s criminal propensity. For example, in a prosecution for possession of cocaine, a prosecutor may not introduce evidence of a defendant’s prior convictions for possession of cocaine if the purpose of that evidence is merely to say, “He has possessed cocaine in the past, and that means he is more likely to be guilty of possessing cocaine in this instance.” The reason we have this rule is that maybe that prior possession actually does make the defendant more likely to have committed the same crime again, but maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the prior offense is completely unrelated. It is entirely possible for a person to have previously been guilty of possession of cocaine, but later be completely innocent of the same charge. So, there is a rule of evidence that errs on the side of innocence, and prohibits the introduction of such prior acts.

I’m no fan of Rittenhouse, but most of the Judge’s evidentiary rulings have been appropriate.

Source: Criminal defense trial lawyer and public defender.

watch_over_me on November 12nd, 2021 at 14:45 UTC »

Because it's not relevant.

You have no control over how someone else is going to perceive you, nor does it pertain to whether he committed a crime or not.

This is no different then the "he did drugs" response when the police kill another innocent person.

This happened 4 months after the event for Christ sake, lol.