Post by lowell on Nov 20, 2021 7:12:16 GMT -6
"Two Days Before Rittenhouse Verdict, a Native Woman Was Imprisoned for Killing Her Alleged Rapist"
'The cases are different, but the results illustrate larger disparities about what we consider self-defense.
Madison Pauly
Reporter
"Two days before a nearly all-white jury bought Kyle Rittenhouse’s claim he was acting in self-defense when he shot three men, killing two, at a Black Lives Matter protest, Maddesyn George, a 27-year-old Native mother, was sitting in a courtroom in Eastern Washington, waiting to learn how many years she would have to spend in federal prison for a shooting a white man she said had raped her."
"What happens in these courtrooms affects our lives and our culture and our behaviors. It sends a message to certain people that if they want to take a deadly weapon into spaces where it could get volatile, and then claim—after they kill people—to have been in fear for their life, a court is likely to exonerate them. When we see demonstrations against anti-Black violence, against hate crimes, against police violence, does this decision then license people who feel like those demonstrations themselves are an act of aggression, to go in with their firearms and start shooting? That, to me, is the torturous logic at the heart of this decision"
"In a way, this expands the idea of self-defense, right? If Kyle Rittenhouse put himself in this situation, and yet he could successfully claim self-defense, that’s sort of expanding the notion of what qualifies. Might that be good for other people whose self-defense claims typically aren’t believed—like women who kill abusive partners in self-defense?
It might affect, say, a white woman who wants to take a firearm into a Black Lives Matter protests and threaten demonstrators. But it will not expand the terrain of self-defensive capacity for a woman who uses a firearm to defend herself from an angry or violent boyfriend."
"If you look at what people are taught to do in a mass shooting, if you see somebody walking around with a firearm, and you’re supposed to try to take it away from them. What we have were people trying to disarm a potential threat. It turned out, he was a horrible threat. A real threat. And yet, the court exonerates him—and treats the people who tried to disarm him as the perpetrators. That, to me, is bonkers.
"We tend to interpret especially female perpetrators of violence through a very particularly curated chronological lens. Are you familiar with the case of Brittany Smith? This was a woman who killed the perpetrator in her own home, and she was defending her brother. In the trial, they were throwing out the evidence—horrible evidence of physical violence, all kinds of evidence that this man had brutalized her—and they spliced it out. It was like they did this curation of chronology that completely excluded all the evidence of sexual violence and harm that had preceded the deadly encounter.
Is that because she didn’t shoot him right in the middle of him raping her? Like, what does it take?""
Is that because she didn’t shoot him right in the middle of him raping her? Like, what does it take?""
"There really are very few cases you can point to where a woman who kills or maims the man who sexually assaults her, is exonerated. She’s probably going to go to prison. And if she doesn’t go to prison, she’s going to plea to something so that she can avoid prison time. But she will be criminalized for taking that life."
Source Mother Jones www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2021/11/rittenhouse-not-guilty-self-defense-maddesyn-george/