No Verdict: Judge Retires Kyle Rittenhouse Jury After 8.5 Hours of Deliberation

No verdict has been reached as of yet in the murder trial of 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, with Judge Bruce Schroeder retiring the jury on Tuesday night after 8.5 hours of deliberation.

Exactly why the jury has not yet settled on a unanimous decision remains unknown at this point. After the judge retired them for the night, they were ordered to avoid discussing the case with anyone and to return at 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning to continue deliberations.

Signs that deliberation would go longer than expected began to show earlier in the day when the jury broke for lunch.

As Breitbart News reported, “The jury will consider two charges of first-degree murder, with the ability to convict on ‘lesser included offenses’”:

It will also consider two charges of reckless endangerment, and one charge of attempted murder. A curfew violation charge was dropped earlier in the trial, and the judge tossed a weapons charge Monday after prosecutors agreed Rittenhouse had not broken the law.

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The prosecution spent much of its closing argument behaving as a team of defense lawyers, attempting to poke holes in the defense’s argument that Rittenhouse had acted in self-defense when he shot and killed two rioters and wounded another on August 25, 2020, during Black Lives Matter riots that wracked the city after false reports the police had shot and wounded an unarmed black man, Jacob Blake Jr. (Blake was later found to have been armed with a knife while resisting arrest.)

On August 25, 2020, then-17-year-old Rittenhouse traveled up from Antioch, Illinois, to Kenosha, Wisconsin, during the riots over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, hoping to aid a local business owner in defending his car dealership that had suffered $1.5 million in damages.

As the night unfolded, Rittenhouse, armed with an AR-15, was allegedly attacked by rioters, during which time he fatally shot two people and wounded one. Several witnesses have testified that Rittenhouse fired his gun only after being pursued, with one prosecution witness admitting that Rittenhouse shot him only after he had pointed a gun at the minor.