If there is a visit to purgatory awaiting people who stir up racial tensions unnecessarily, imagine how long that purgatorial interlude will last for lawyers who say race is more important than evidence in a murder trial.
Yet that’s what “criminal defense attorney” Page Pate, who is white, said on CNN as the jury deliberated in the case of Kenosha, Wisconsin, shooter Kyle Rittenhouse. He said this as a rebuttal to a correct and contrary statement from black former federal prosecutor Phillip Turner.
Pate was arguing for jury nullification. This was a concise distillation of the sickening leftist obsession with race, along with sexuality, as a predominant determinant of human behavior. There is no other accurate way to describe this attitude than to say that the obsession is itself racist and deeply wrong.
CNN’s segment began with co-host Victor Blackwell noting that an earlier guest spoke of “how race is an undertone to this trial because of the consideration if Kyle Rittenhouse were a black 17-year-old running around with an AR-15 … would there be a different narrative here? What do you think of the makeup of the [11 white, one ‘person of color’] jury? Is that relevant?”
Turner correctly and directly shot down the assertion.
“I don’t think so at all,” he said. “Obviously, it’s a very difficult case, and it’s a very heated environment, but I don’t think race is important here. … The narrative here is that all the people who were shot were white, that the defendant is white, so it’s hard to bring that kind of narrative in. … I really don’t think race is a factor here on this case.”
Pate, though, wouldn’t let the issue die. Several minutes later, after the conversation had moved on, Pate insisted on revisiting the racial angle.
“Race is important here,” he stressed, “not so much because of the racial makeup of the victim and the person who’s on trial but in the jury — how you perceive the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse. Do you look at Kyle as your son, your cousin … your brother, or do you look at him as someone who inserted himself into a very volatile situation with a very dangerous firearm looking for trouble? And I don’t think you make that decision based on the evidence. I think you make that decision on who you are as a person” (by which, of course, he meant “on your race”).
Pate is saying people are not capable of objectively viewing evidence by dispassionately using their intellects. Instead, their “identity” determines their assessments of guilt or innocence. In a nutshell, that’s a direct assault on the entire moral basis of a neutrally adjudicated trial by jury.
And Pate still wasn’t done. He continued, “And so that’s how I do think the racial makeup of this jury is important. People see things differently, and it’s a product of culture, background, experience, a whole ball of things that are outside the evidence that was presented in court.”
Yes, he said the crucial determinant lies “outside the evidence that was presented in court.”
The mind reels. If this is true, then what’s the point of having neutral evidentiary rules and all sorts of laws governing how trials must be conducted? Why not just let fly with whatever will best play on a jury’s emotions?
Pate’s position is unconscionable, indeed despicable. Judges everywhere, not to mention popular culture, must decisively eradicate this attack on the rule of law and on equality under the law.
