Guyanese Online

The Economist – Daniel Knowles: Midwest correspondent

For the past few days, a huge number of American journalists have been camped outside the rather grand courthouse of Kenosha, a small city in Wisconsin. On Friday November 19, they got what they were waiting for. After three days of deliberation, the jury in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, an 18-year-old from Antioch, Illinois, declared the defendant not guilty on all counts. It was a shocking result after a deeply messy trial, in which the judge accused journalists from MSNBC, a left-leaning television network, of following the jury, and the defence repeatedly pressed for a mistrial.

The interest, however, was driven by what the trial says: it is fundamentally a debate about gun rights in America. Despite the arguments over the quality of evidence—with the judge, Bruce Schroeder, who is in his 70s, asking time and again for clarification on issues such as how mobile-phone cameras work—there is not a lot of dispute over what happened on the night in question, August 25th 2020.           Continue reading →