Verdict was just as prosecutors 'pandered to the mob' in Rittenhouse trial | Opinion

I have a professional interest in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

I was a state prosecutor for 30-plus years, during which time I also trained prosecutors throughout Florida. The Florida Supreme Court has designated me a board certified expert in criminal trials, since 1993. After retirement I taught trial advocacy in a law school, and still teach continuing legal education (including ethics) to prosecutors. The conduct of the Rittenhouse prosecutors is the most unethical I’ve ever witnessed.

Rittenhouse was on trial for what occurred during the 2020 riots in Kenosha. He was accused of murdering two rioters who attacked him — and attempting to murder a third who admitted under oath that he threatened Rittenhouse with a gun before being shot. The prosecution’s own evidence refuted the charges by proving Rittenhouse acted entirely in self-defense.

The prosecutors either didn’t properly investigate before indicting him, or knew the evidence didn’t support the charges and prosecuted him anyway. Either conduct is unethical.

Falsely charging a citizen with a crime the evidence doesn’t support is the worst possible ethical violation by a prosecutor. Doing so for purely political reasons, as was obviously done here, makes the prosecutors’ conduct even more egregious.

One witness testified about how, before trial, a prosecutor tried to get him to change his story. The prosecutor’s conduct (which the witness described under oath) may have been solicitation to commit perjury — a felony in Wisconsin. As unethical as the conduct of the prosecutors was before trial, it was as bad during the trial in the presence of the jury.

During the cross-examination of Rittenhouse, the lead prosecutor first intentionally violated one of an accused’s most fundamental constitutional rights, and then ignored one of the judge’s pre-trial orders. Any rookie prosecutor knows better, so it had to have been intentional.

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After the first instance the judge admonished the prosecutor. The second time the judge had heard enough and chastised him. That prosecutor was lucky to have gotten off with a butt-chewing. I practiced before old-school Brevard judges who would have held him in contempt for such unethical conduct. Then, during the closing argument, the prosecutors improperly mischaracterized those Rittenhouse shot — and it was discovered the prosecutors deliberately withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense

Long ago the United States Supreme Court made it clear that in our criminal justice system the prosecutor’s role “is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” And that, “It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one.”

Based on the evidence the prosecutors presented at Rittenhouse’s trial, there was no “legitimate means” to pursue his prosecution. Anyone who still believes this prosecution was justified understands nothing about the law, and is blinded by partisan politics to the point of terminal ignorance.

Such a travesty can only happen when prosecutors become politicized and abandon the pursuit of justice. Mob rule (which is this case includes too many in media) takes over, and the fundamental concept that an accused citizen is “innocent until proven guilty” evaporates. The Rittenhouse prosecutors pandered to the mob.

Now that Rittenhouse has been rightfully acquitted, the mob has focused their collective infantile machinations on the judge. They condemn him as biased because instead of becoming part of the mob himself he did his duty as an impartial arbiter assuring the accused’s rights were protected.

This case illustrates why, to work properly, our criminal justice system depends on an independent judiciary. Part of a judge’s duty is to make sure the government follows the law if the prosecutors fail to fulfill their ethical duty to do so themselves.

But the mob would rather have a justice system like those under totalitarian regimes where if the accused is not of the politically approved ideological persuasion, the trial is merely a show in which the judge assists the persecutors, and the accused is presumed guilty. As Nobel laureate lawyer Friedrich Hayek wrote in “The Mirage of Social Justice”, that’s where “social justice” leads.

This trial reaffirmed that a citizen jury is, in political philosopher Lysander Spooner’s words, the “palladium of liberty” against government tyranny. The judge, and citizens on Rittenhouse’s jury, did their duty. The prosecutors flagrantly shirked theirs pursuing a dangerous political agenda.

Gary Beatty lives in Sharpes and is retired from 30 years as an assistant state attorney in Brevard County. He has a doctorate in law and is certified in criminal trial law by the Florida Bar.

This article originally appeared on Florida Today: A just verdict: Prosecutors 'pandered to mob' in Rittenhouse trial | Opinion