TIME’s French: Media ‘Dropped the Ball’ on Rittenhouse Coverage By Not Understanding the Law on Self-Defense

EXCERPT:

FRENCH: "Well, one of the takeaways is that I think media dropped the ball — parts of the media dropped the ball on covering this case from the start. Because right from the start there were a couple of things that were pretty immediately obvious. One was we knew what Wisconsin self-defense law was, and the other one was there was a lot of video evidence out there in the public domain. And what the video evidence showed was that Rittenhouse was being chased before he fired fatal shots, that he was knocked to the ground, he was attacked before he fired fatal shots. And if you knew Wisconsin's self-defense law and you knew through the rules around open carry, then you knew he was going to have a strong defense. But what a lot of people did is they took the foolishness of being there, the recklessness of being there in itself. A 17-year-old armed with a rifle going to a riot, to social unrest? That's ridiculous. 17-year-olds shouldn't be doing that. And they conflated that with all that followed, and that's a big mistake. That's not how juries look at it. Juries look at the law, they compare the law to the facts, and under Wisconsin self-defense law, he had a strong defense. And honestly, it was pretty apparent from the beginning that he had a strong defense."