The Wisconsin judge in the teenager Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder ordered tougher measures to protect the identities of jurors in the case after someone was caught filming them as a bus came to take them to court.
“I was told . that this morning, at the retreat, there was someone, and he was videotaping the jury,” Kenosha County District Court Judge Bruce Schroeder said on Tuesday as the trial entered its seventh day. He added that the agents approached the person and required that the video be deleted from your smartphone.
Judge Bruce Schroeder says that someone was recording a video of the jury this morning. The person responsible was requested to delete all footage and that if it happens again the court would take the phone away. pic.twitter.com/vUaxZUSUUK
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) November 9, 2021
Sochroder said, “I told them to pick up the phone if it happens again.”
Given how political the process is, the security breach is worrisome. Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, is accused of killing two men and hurting a third during a Black Lives Matter riot in Kenosha in August 2020. His lawyers say he killed the men in self-defense when they attacked him and tried to take his gun.
Left-wing observers have expressed indignation last week because everything but one member of the jury is white, even though Rittenhouse and his three alleged victims are all white, and the incident occurred in a predominantly white county.
The jurors’ names are usually kept secret during trials and sometimes even after they are done with their jobs. This was the case in a trial in Minneapolis before this year, after former police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of killing George Floyd. Floyd’s death led to BLM protests in the US and even abroad in the summer of 2020.
For the jurors’ safety, the judge in the Chauvin case said that their names had to be kept secret for at least six months. Members of the jury could make themselves known by talking about the process in public if they wanted to. Lisa Christensen, an alternate juror in the Chauvin trial, told NBC affiliate KARE-TV at the time that he cared about people “coming to my house if they were not happy with the verdict.”
Tuesday, Judge Schroeder told the Rittenhouse jurors that the video shoot had been canceled and that new procedures were being put in place in case something like this happened again. During the jury selection process, some potential jurors said they would be afraid for their safety if the public found out what role they played in the case.
Fox News reported on past claims that the jurors were taking pictures of people at the Kenosha County Courthouse.
Tuesday was the end of the prosecutors’ case. Schroeder allegedly dropped the charge of curfew violation against Rittenhouse, saying that the state did not provide enough evidence.
