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Judge in Rittenhouse Trial Asks Entire Courtroom Including Jury to Clap For Defense Witness

How is this not an automatic mistrial?

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There has been, to say the least, some consternation over the behavior of Judge Bruce Schroeder during the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. He has given every indication that he already sides with the defendant in the case from Kenosha, Wisconsin, although judges are intended to be non-biased.

But after shouting at the prosecutor for trying to bring up Rittenhouse’s association with a white supremacist group, it was looking like Schroeder may have decided his opinion in advance. When he grilled the prosecution over the use of pictures of Kyle in court that depicted him in a bar celebrating his freedom after the events that took place in Kenosha, people began to question how this could possibly be happening in a fair trial.

Now, Schroeder has raised even more eyebrows, as he singled out a witness for Rittenhouse’s defense — so that the entire courtroom, including the jury, could give him a round of applause.

A reporter for the New York Times, Nick Bogel-Burroughs, tweeted a series of messages detailing how Judge Schroeder stopped the proceedings, asked if there were any veterans in the room, and upon finding out that there was only one — the next defense witness, Dr. John Black — asked everyone in attendance to “give a round of applause” to veterans. A group represented by one man. On the defense.

That it has nothing to do with the case is almost irrelevant. Neither is it pertinent that the judge asked if there were other veterans in the room prior to the call for applause.

What is germane to the scenario is that any unbiased judge, upon seeing that the only person they were about to single out for praise was on the side of the defense, would have stopped themselves from asking even the jury to join him in applauding someone whose testimony hadn’t even been heard yet, on one side of the case.

How hard would it have been for Judge Schroeder to simply say, “Since it’s Veterans’ Day, I would like to thank all the present and former members of the armed forces here today” and be done with it?

And guess what: everyone clapped for the defense witness:

And the jurors clapped as well:

VIDEO:

Twitter was disgusted:

Andrew Simpson
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Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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