On Wednesday night, the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse had not yet concluded. That didn’t stop leftist news anchor Chris Cuomo from reaching his own verdict and sharing it with his audience.
“Was the threat that he faced something that made using deadly force reasonable?” Cuomo said on CNN. “That last part is gonna be a problem, I’m telling you. Self-defense in Wisconsin is about imminent threat. You have to fear, to use deadly force, that someone is gonna really hurt you, serious bodily injury or death.”
Cuomo was not there on that night, and his name is not Kyle Rittenhouse. As such, he really has no way to know whether Rittenhouse had that fear.
According to Rittenhouse himself, he did have that fear. Rittenhouse also provided evidence as to why he had that fear, such as men reaching for his gun and threatening to kill him before he made the decision to use deadly force.
“Is someone trying to take your gun … if that’s what even was happening, was it reasonable to believe that that may happen?” Cuomo said. “That’s the standard to use deadly force in Wisconsin.”
This question is exactly the one the courts are trying to answer, which is why Rittenhouse is on trial. Yet even in his understanding of the justice system, Cuomo showed ignorance.
“He admits he intended to use deadly force, so he is going to have to convince the jury, or the jury will have to feel convinced, that it was reasonable,” he said.
This is not, in fact, how the justice system works in America. People who are on trial are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.
As such, the burden of proof is not on Rittenhouse to convince the jury he is innocent of murder. Instead, it is the prosecution’s job to prove Rittenhouse’s killing of two men was not self-defense and should be considered homicide.
Nonetheless, Cuomo continued on his unhinged rant against Rittenhouse.
“The jury has the difficult job here of balancing two very different faces of a killer: the one that I’m showing you now, weepy, cherubic child Kyle … or the cool customer in Kenosha that night, who was described as cold and calm in telling officers that he had just killed people, that he was using live rounds,” Cuomo said.
The underlying tone in Cuomo’s entire diatribe was that Rittenhouse was a cold-blooded murderer. Coming from the leftists over at CNN, it really is not that surprising.
Predictable as it is, Cuomo’s behavior is still extremely inappropriate. He is not on the jury, and he is not the one tasked with determining Rittenhouse’s guilt or innocence.
By giving a biased, one-sided take on the trial, Cuomo is attempting to convince his viewers that Rittenhouse is already guilty before his trial concludes. It is the same trick the media played during the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
When Cuomo ended his speech by suggesting the verdict will “reverberate far beyond the walls of this courthouse,” he was not making a prediction. He was making a threat.
Cuomo knows as well as anyone that if Rittenhouse is found innocent, riots will ensue from leftists who refuse to honor our nation’s principles. If he had his way, the presumption of innocence would disappear, and mob justice would rule in America.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
