11-15-2021, 08:51 PM
(11-15-2021, 08:17 PM)GMDino Wrote: I'm sure there are those who will say if the judge doesn't understand THIS then can we trust him with the rest of the trial.
Those people are probably wrong unless we see a whole BUNCH of stuff this judge doesn't understand.
As usual I will let people smarter than me explain:
Telling the judge they are wrong, educating the judge on the correct law and correct application then sometimes arguing with them is what we do as lawyers. Sometimes gets weird because judges don’t like to be corrected or wrong but to do this is the job and very common.
— Public Defendering, Esq. (@fodderyfodder) November 15, 2021
And, I'm repeating myself but this probably hens more than we will ever know because most trials are not televised. And since this is a hot topic people will apply their own biases to everything they see and hear.
I receive calls from court officers, which is a probation officer who works in the courtroom, asking me to explain certain things to bench officers all the time. The vast majority of the time the people and defense will end up agreeing with my explanation. Of course this is not always the case, but your example is also correct, both litigators will argue the law and its interpretations with the bench officer all the time. At the end of this debate the bench officer makes their ruling, which is final unless new evidence or information comes to light. Criminal laws are often written by people with no background in criminal law. You see some of this ambiguity in the WI law that saw the judge toss the illegal possession charge, and laws cannot be written in a way to cover every possible scenario.
Like I stated earlier in this thread, the only unusual thing I've seen in this trial (aside from the case being garbage from the jump) is the prosecutor using Rittenhouse's exercising his 5th Amendment right against him and then deciding on his own that he could ignore the bench officer's prior ruling on a matter because he "believed" that circumstances had changed.
I'll add for those who accuse me of bias in this incident, I've been a slam dunk witness for the defense when the people's case was weak. I've stated honestly on the stand that I believed the wrong person was being charged or that the evidence did not support the charges in my professional opinion. I'm about what's factual and fair, not what puts the most people in prison or sets the most people free.
