Kyle Rittenhouse jury to return for 4th day of deliberations
Global News
Rittenhouse, 18, is on trial for killing two men and wounding a third with a rifle during a turbulent night of protests that erupted in Kenosha in the summer of 2020
The jury at Kyle Rittenhouse‘s murder trial was to return Friday for a fourth day of deliberations, after a quiet day behind closed doors that ended with one juror asking if she could take home the jury instructions.
Thursday’s court session was notable largely for Judge Bruce Schroeder banning MSNBC from the courthouse after a freelancer was accused of following the jurors in their bus.
Rittenhouse, 18, is on trial for killing two men and wounding a third with a rifle during a turbulent night of protests that erupted in Kenosha in the summer of 2020 after a Black man, Jacob Blake, was shot by a white police officer.
Even as the jury weighed the evidence, two mistrial requests from the defense hung over the case, with the potential to upend the verdict if the panel were to convict Rittenhouse. One of those requests asks the judge to go even further and bar prosecutors from retrying him.
Schroeder banned MSNBC after police said they briefly detained a man who had followed the jury bus and may have tried to photograph jurors.
NBC News said in a statement that the man was a freelancer who received a citation for a traffic violation that took place near the jury vehicle, and he “never photographed or intended to photograph them.”
Before the jurors retired around 4 p.m. at what the judge said was their own request, one of them asked if she could take the jury instructions home, and the judge said yes but told her she couldn’t talk to anyone about them. Before deliberations, Schroeder read the jury some 36 pages of instructions on the charges and the laws of self-defense.
After the jury departed, Rittenhouse attorney Mark Richards told the judge he feared that letting members take home instructions would lead to jurors looking things up in the dictionary or doing their own research.