Despite that, I’m going to flog it once again.
As my newshound readers have, no doubt, already heard, the judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse case in Kenosha, WI is a prime example of why justice is really a dead letter in this country. I have railed in the past about judged who fail to use their judgment at all, instead relying on all kind of bureaucratic tricks like sentencing guidelines to justify their actions, moaning that their hands are tied when it comes to a defendant. Judge Schroeder is the other end of that spectrum. Here’s a man who thinks that his judgment is really the only thing that matters, and is willing to use it arbitrarily to push for any result toward which he is biased (though it’s a virtual certainty he would claim his own neutrality on all matters). If you haven’t caught up on Wisconsin’s voice of Law and Order, I direct you to this article from the Chicago Tribune (“From humiliating defendants to giving them wide latitude, the ‘confident’ judge overseeing Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder trial doesn’t shy from controversy“), a paper not known for being a bastion of leftist radicalism.
To put this in Life After Prison context, when in August 2020 the news about Rittenhouse became known in federal prison, I didn’t hear one inmate of any race or political persuasion say anything like, “Well, let’s just see how the facts come in.” No, the unison chorus was, “Damn! He just shot those dudes and he’s walking around with an AR-15 out in the open, and the cops just went on by him!” The follow up comments went something like this, “Well, that’s being white in America for you. If it had been a black dude with an AR-15, you know what the police would have done.” Any attempt to controvert this particular piece of prison reasoning is pure ideological spin. This is a case of inmates speaking truths born of experience.
You see, Good Judge Schroeder is also teaching us similar truths by his rulings. White supremacist vigilantes cannot be presumed to have “victims.” To say that they have “victims” before “all the facts are in” would undermine the very premise of their inherent innocence and the liberty and license that attaches to that. Actually it’s more than that. To say that someone who is shot on the street by a total stranger is not a “victim” is to say that homicide and attempted homicide are, in the right circumstances, actually “victimless crimes.” It transforms the most extreme criminal prohibition we have into something that, in the logic at play in that Kenosha courtroom, voids the humans who got shot of their very humanity. To even hint that it is justifiable is to strip the “homo” from “homicide.” To say that the people who got shot are “rioters” and “looters,” rather than victims, is to dehumanize them so as to maintain the questionable privilege of the defendant. In the driest legal sense, the dead receive no “due process.” They hadn’t been convicted of rioting and looting, but they may be presumed to be guilty, based on what facts aside from being associated with anti-whitesupremicism, I don’t know. That alone, however, as my fellow inmates know, is crime enough. After all, many people who spend years behind the razor wire are there because of what might be called “victimless crimes” by a large swath of the population. That popular sentiment doesn’t preclude their prosecution and condemnation, however.
Good Judge Schroeder is simply showing America what goes on in courtrooms every day. He is revealing, in a high profile way, a kind of thinking that is far more common that most people on the left would like to believe and most people on the right would acknowledge that they find rather satisfying. Then everybody can throw up their hands and howl about the system is broken. It’s not broken, friends. It’s working jus the way it was intended. The “problem” is that this is a moment that causes us to face up to that intent and either acknowledge or ignore it. If we acknowledge it, we could then, presumably, change it, if democracy still functions. Or we could just let it slide, which is more or less the same as ignoring it and, thereby, approving of it. I will be all the nothing that I possess on utter inaction.
I say this because Good Judge Schroeder is elected to his seat on the bench. He ran unopposed in his last election despite being a known quantity in terms of how he uses his judgment to thumb the scale of justice. Literally, nobody could be bothered to challenge him. Yes, elected, meaning not only could someone oppose him but that the citizen who go to the polls actually endorse him. His unopposed reelection also happened in 2014 and 2008. When we freely give power, we get what we get. We earn our consequences. Just ask any inmate about that. We are reminded all the time that we have “consequences.” But let’s also remember that “the Innocent” don’t. We try to stay innocent by selecting a henchman to do our dirty work for us, out of sight, unexamined, unquestioned, and neatly compartmentalized. We are all so many Thurman Mermans, devising elaborate ways to get revenge on the skateboard kids who torment him without having to be responsible for the revenge.
Good Judge Schroeder also opined that, “Pope Benedict was a member of the Nazi Youth [sic] because he had to be.” Excuse me, Your Honor, but nobody HAD to be part of the Hitler Youth. Some Germans did, in fact, resist Hitler and Naziism. People became part of the Hitler Youth because their families found it more beneficial to bow to white supremacism and extreme nationalist hatred than to stand up against it. I know this, in part, not simply because I have a less distorted view of history than Your Honor (thanks, in part, to Critical Race Theory), but also because I have literally lived with people who were members of the Hitler Youth! Good Judge Schroeder forgets, never knew, or distorts the fact that a significant part of the allied occupation of post-WWII Germany also had to do with exposing the average, “innocent” German to the horrors that their innocence made possible. It did not matter if you had nothing directly to do with the Holocaust; you were still going to be made to face up to the fact that racist genocide went on in your name and that you willfully ignored or denied it. Going along with or “having to be” part of white supremacy does not absolve one of its consequences or allow one to reap its twisted benefits for free. And why isn’t Benedict still Pope, anyway? If going along to get along were a valid criminal defense, our prisons would be empty. It’s rare that people commit any crime that is somehow out of context from the circumstances of their lives. “Just doing what I always did, Your Honor. Felt I had to. It’s how I was raised.” Try that one on for size and see if it doesn’t get you 10 more years.
If you know anything about jailhouse lawyers you will know this: They don’t get involved in the law because they believe in some sense of fairness or justice. They get involved in the law because they are looking for technicalities by which they can spring themselves (and others) from Hell. The justice system isn’t a shining ideal. Only the Innocent can afford that fantasy. The justice system as a bureaucratic system by which some folks exercise power over others. As an ideal, it was probably still born. BLM has highlighted the ways in remains dead, and that’s one of the primary reasons for people’s hatred of BLM. Nobody who has been behind the razor wire has the luxury to believe in it, yet here I am, sodden with irony, seeming as if I could whip it back to life. The desire to reclaim innocence is strong. But that’s why we have an idea of heaven, isn’t it?
Spot on, sadly.