Jury deliberations, expected to start next week, will include consideration of six separate criminal counts. The jurors may be instructed to consider lesser charges as well.
The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, which has played out over the last two weeks, has seemed at times to come down to a matter of deciding whether Mr. Rittenhouse was acting in self-defense when he shot three men amid demonstrations in Kenosha, Wis., or whether he was committing serious crimes, including first-degree intentional homicide. But the 12 jurors who are expected to begin deliberating the case next week are actually tasked with a far more complex set of decisions: They must weigh six individual criminal counts that Mr. Rittenhouse has been charged with, each reflecting prosecutors’ claims about different portions of his behavior that night in August 2020. And beyond those six counts, the jurors may also be asked to weigh an array of less serious charges, the judge signaled on Friday, after a debate over jury instructions between prosecutors and the defense. Closing arguments are expected on Monday morning in the trial of Mr. Rittenhouse, who was 17 when he came to Kenosha with a semiautomatic rifle amid unrest over a police shooting and fired eight shots, killing two men and wounding a third. The charges include first-degree intentional homicide, which is called first-degree murder in other states and is among the most serious charges on the books in Wisconsin. If convicted of that charge, he could face life in prison. Judge Bruce Schroeder indicated on Friday that he would let the jury consider offenses less serious than the ones Mr. Rittenhouse stands charged with but did not formally announce what those charges might be. “The lesser charge implicitly invites a compromise among the jurors,” said Michael O’Hear, a professor at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, who said requests for juries to consider charges less serious than the ones a defendant originally faced were common.
