Wisconsin Judge Rules Prosecutors May Not Refer To The Two People Killed By Kyle Rittenhouse As “Victims”

The Associated Press reports:

A Wisconsin judge laid out the final ground rules Monday on what evidence will be allowed when Kyle Rittenhouse goes on trial next week for shooting three people during a protest against police brutality, ruling he’ll permit testimony from the defense’s use-of-force expert and on how police welcomed Rittenhouse and others carrying guns during the demonstration.

Rittenhouse sat silently as his defense team and prosecutors argued the last minute motions. What both sets of lawyers can and can’t say in the course of the trial was the subject. “If more than one of them were engaged in arson, rioting, looting, I’m not going to tell the defense you can’t call them that,” the judge said. The judge also ruled that the two deceased men and the injured man could not be referred to as victims. “The word ‘victim’ is a loaded, loaded word,” he said. “‘Alleged victim’ is a cousin to it.”

The Insider reports: 

Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger had argued in a recent motion that Rittenhouse’s lawyers should be banned from using the terms [rioters, looters], since prosecutors will be banned from referring to the dead or injured men as “victims.”

But Schroeder disagreed, saying the two scenarios were not the same. It’s common for judges across the country to ban the word “victim” during trials, because it implies that a crime was committed and could therefore prejudice a jury against a defendant.

But since Rosenbaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz are not the ones on trial, Rittenhouse’s defense team is free to describe them as “rioters,” “looters,” or “arsonists” so long as they provide evidence that the men were rioting, looting, or committing arson, Schroeder said.

Kenosha County Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder was first elected in 1984“