The courthouse at Glynn County, Georgia

While the jury was out and the fate of Kyle Rittenhouse was in the balance, we happened to be sitting in a barber chair in Maine. The television news was carrying a report on the trial, and we asked the lady who was barbering what she thought. “Not guilty!” she exclaimed. Before we could express our agreement with her, she added, “But the three in Georgia — guilty, guilty, guilty.” 

She turned out to be spot on, of course, a reminder of the common sense of the American people. While listening to the television and snipping hair, this clear-headed barber managed to cut through all the hysteria among the press and politicians — and even our president, who, without waiting for evidence, accused the 17-year-old white man who’d shot three white men of being a white supremacist.

The verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse wasn’t about the refusal of a jury to convict a white man for shooting three individuals ostensibly protesting against racism. It was about the failure of the prosecution to meet the standard burden of proof in criminal cases — in this case, establishing beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Rittenhouse wasn’t scared for his life when he defended himself. If he was fearing for his life, he was not guilty.

The thing to bear in mind in criminal cases is that the defendant isn’t required to prove anything. He can’t be forced to testify. He’s presumed innocent. The burden of proof is always on solely the prosecutor. In the Ahmaud Arbery case, the prosecutor faced the same burden of proof as Mr. Rittenhouse’s prosecutor. It was the facts that were different. The accused were the pursuers and the dead man was the one who was being pursued.

The pursued was unarmed, on foot, and trying desperately to get away. The pursuers went after him in pickup trucks and with guns. They precipitated the scuffle in which the fatal shots were fired. In the end the jury appears to have concluded that it was impossible for the pursuers to be in fear of their lives. In short it was “a verdict based on the facts,” prosecutor Linda Dunikoski said after the trial. 

“When you present the truth to people and they can see it, they will do the right thing,” Ms. Dunikoski added. And so the conviction of Arbery’s killers — “guilty, guilty, guilty” — by 11 white men and women and one black man certainly puts the lie to the idea that American juries are blinded by racism, and that, as the New York Times claimed after Mr. Rittenhouse’s exoneration, “courts give white men a pass for their actions.”  

“In America, the specter of an all-white jury contemplating damage done by a white person to the life, property or body of a Black person looms large,” Time said when the mostly white jury was empaneled in Arbery’s case. “It is a troubling and recurrent part of the nation’s brutal racial history.” That presumption of racial animus was defied by the Arbery jurors who delivered a vindication of colorblind justice that will be remembered for generations. The mainstream editors need a good haircut.

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Image: Michael Rivera, via Wikimedia Commons