Looks like poor, doomed Kyle might’ve stopped shopping around for a defense attorney sooner than was good for him.

Kyle Rittenhouse’s attorneys asked the judge on Wednesday to declare a mistrial without prejudice before the jury reaches a decision, arguing that the prosecutors sent them an inferior version of a key video. A mistrial with prejudice means Rittenhouse could be tried again if the judge were to grant the request. Judge Bruce Schroeder did not immediately rule on the request, the second mistrial motion this week.  On Monday, the defense filed a mistrial motion with prejudice.

Defense attorney Corey Chirafisi argued that the defense team would have done things differently had they received the higher quality video earlier. Although neither video shows Rittenhouse aiming his gun at the Ziminskis, the defense team is suggesting that the state manipulated critical evidence.

Assistant District Attorney James Kraus argued that it was not the fault of prosecutors that the file got compressed when it was received by the defense.

“We’re focusing too heavily on a technological glitch,” he said.

Uh huh. Die in a fucking fire, you lying, soulless son of a bitch. This next bit grabbed my attention.

Although Kraus claimed to have no idea how to compress a video, a video software app called Handbrake was spotted on his laptop during the hearing on Wednesday.

Handbrake calls itself  an “open source video transcoder” that converts video from nearly any format.

The program is used to compress and downsize videos, but in doing so, it reduces the quality, tech experts say.

I haven’t been called upon to do a whole hell of a lot of video editing over the years and have little if any aptitude for it, but coincidentally enough I have Handbrake on the Trusty iMac myself, have even used it a good few times. It’s an excellent application, user-friendly and by no means a bridge too far to be learned and made useful for any reasonably intelligent person.

As for reduction in quality, that comes hand in glove with ALL compression utilities and/or devices. Actually, reduction in quality is an unavoidable part of the compression process, whether it’s video, audio, or data; in a way, it’s the whole point of compression. You can’t reduce a file, vid, or audio track to a smaller size without sacrificing at least some sharpness, clarity, and detail along the way. Life on Earth just ain’t that way, sorry.

Loss of quality is hardly the point at issue in this case anyway; intentional deception is. By concealing the existence of a higher-res version from the defense—which, by the way, is against the fucking law in American courts, explicitly and specifically so—until the very last hours of their little Kangaroo Court, the grubby, transparently dishonest persecution team added yet another tier of blatantly unethical manipulation atop what was already a ziggurat of illegality. The rest of us can only hope and pray that the standards, qualifications, and practices for DA offices in their own localities haven’t quite scraped the bottom of the barrel yet, as those in Wisconsin clearly have.

In any event, this is NOT indicative of the defense team’s confidence in winning an acquittal. No lawyer, I, nor do I play one on TV, but it looks to me as if they’re floundering and flailing here, casting about for any hook they can hang a “Not Guilty” hat on. I am hardly the Lone Ranger on that view, either.

“Without prejudice” means a new trial. They base this on not having the best quality video. They say they would have prepared their defense differently.

This could just be setting up an “in case” situation if Rittenhouse is found guilty.

But this also means the defense thinks that Rittenhouse will be convicted.

If the prosecution agrees to this, then the judge is likely to grant a new trial. I suppose the judge COULD, MAYBE deny the motion, but it’s hard if both defense and prosecution agree.

Prosecution opposes — because they think that the jury, by asking to see the “raises gun” video, is thinking about convicting.

I disagree with that, actually. When a jury wants to see something, sometimes it’s just to clear their last doubts. The OJ jury wanted to review the testimony of the chauffeur who said that he kept ringing OJ’s doorbell and OJ didn’t answer for a half hour (because he was showering after killing his wife), IIRC. People took that to mean they were going to convict. I, smartly, thought it meant they were reviewing it in order to dismiss it.

But this does not look good, my friends.

Indeed it doesn’t. It almost doesn’t really matter, though—not this particular incident of prosecutorial malfeasance and criminality, not all the myriad others already seen, not even which way the verdict itself goes. Kyle’s life is almost certainly ruined already. As the ugly Amerikan truism says, the process is the punishment in our irredeemably warped (in)justice system, which means that from here on out, there are two possibilities, neither of them at all palatable:

• If convicted, Kyle spends the rest of his days behind bars in a maximum-security prison, therefore rendering his life expectancy quite brief
• If acquitted, Kyle spends the rest of his days in court, desperately fighting off as many civil trials, personal injury lawsuits, and miscellaneous other lawyerly harrassments as the Evil Left and George Soros can cobble together to throw at him

Now admittedly, one of those outcomes is objectively more tolerable than the other. But both are decidedly unpleasant, to put it delicately; both redirect an innocent and exemplary young man away from probably a productive and worthwhile life and towards a life of frustration, futility, and hopelessness; both bear about as much resemblance to the concepts of fairness and true justice as I do to this poor little guy:

And, well, here we all are. I say again: this abominable trial should never have happened at all. As for Rittenhouse’s Soros-bought-and-paid-for persecution team, I’ll let Herschel deal with them.

One more time, the entire team of prosecuting attorneys needs to be flogged in broad daylight, stripped naked, and marched to the town square and put in stocks as an example to children everywhere.

A capital idea, but the very least the bastards deserve. I’d prefer a dead-of-night ceremony involving tar, feathers, riding on rails, being splashed about in a lake a bit, the evening’s festivities topped off with a length of thick rope and a tall, sturdy tree myself. But I’m perfectly okay with some light drawing and quartering and/or dragging them around for miles at high speed behind an old pickup truck also, if that would suit other folks better. Hey, I ain’t hard to get along with. Easygoing, agreeable, open to reasonable compromise, that’s me all over.