Kyle Rittenhouse case goes to jury
KENOSHA, Wis. — The Kyle Rittenhouse trial ended much as it began, with defense attorneys painting the teen gunman as a do-gooder who came under attack and prosecutors portraying him as a wannabe soldier who fatally shot two unarmed men.
The dueling portraits reflect the way a polarized country has viewed the shooting since it happened, and the closing arguments occasionally mimicked the vitriolic sound bites that have inflamed the case from the start. In a trial based on a very specific legal question, the politics surrounding the case — the First Amendment, the Second Amendment and police shootings — played a prominent role in the closing arguments.
Rittenhouse, then a 17-year-old resident of north suburban Antioch, volunteered to patrol downtown Kenosha in August 2020 amid turmoil surrounding the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man left partially paralyzed after being shot by a white police officer during a domestic disturbance call days earlier. Prosecutors later declined to charge the officer with wrongdoing.
Carrying an AR-15-style rifle that
