Professor Cheryl Bader was featured in various news outlets’ coverage of the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict. She shared her insight on the impact of the trial as well as what went wrong during the process in articles by Bloomberg Equality and Bloomberg Law.
“I am afraid that as people are empowered by this verdict to weaponize the public spaces, we will see more fatalities, and the ‘reasonable person’ test that underlies self-defense law will become the ‘reasonable gun toting vigilante who is afraid of having his gun taken away’ test,” Cheryl Bader, a former federal prosecutor and now a law professor at Fordham University, said in a statement.
– Bloomberg Equality
“There probably could have been more during the cross-examination, when Rittenhouse was vague and unclear about what his intentions were in traveling there,” Bader said.
– Bloomberg Law
Professor Bader went on to discuss the ways that systemic racism has impacted this case and will continue to impact cases like Rittenhouse’s in The Washington Post.
Cheryl Bader, a former assistant U.S. attorney and a professor at Fordham University School of Law, said that while people of any race can claim self-defense, implicit bias means that race will inevitably factor into who can successfully claim it.
Studies of implicit bias have consistently shown, she said, that “a White man with a gun conjures images of enforcing the law, keeping people in line. Whereas a Black man with a gun promotes ideas of loss of control or instability or gratuitous violence.”
“This is going to play out when a jury is making a determination about whether someone was in reasonable fear,” Bader said.
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Now, Bader said that because of the ubiquity of guns in American life, she fears that the Rittenhouse verdict will effectively become a permission slip for those armed with weapons, especially White people, to play at vigilante justice.
“It empowers people like the McMichaels to police innocent people on the street,” she said. “We’re turning public spaces into the wild West.”
For more on Rittenhouse from Professor Bader see coverage by Yahoo! Finance.