The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has joined a number of public figures in denouncing the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse on charges including murder.
The ACLU is a long-standing institution that has campaigned ‘to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.’ In recent years, it has faced allegations of having prioritised left-leaning causes and positions.
The Rittenhouse case arose from the shooting of three men, two of them fatally, during protests in the town of Kenosha in Wisconsin in August last year. The protests in turn arose from the shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake, by police officers; Rittenhouse had purportedly come to assist in protecting local businesses.
A statement by Shaadie Ali of the ACLU in Wisconsin said that the verdict was indicative of racial preferencing in the United States’ justice system: ‘Despite Kyle Rittenhouse’s conscious decision to take the lives of two people protesting the shooting of Jacob Blake by police, he was not held responsible for his actions, something that is not surprising. But Kyle Rittenhouse isn’t the only one responsible for the deaths that night. The events in Kenosha stem from the deep roots of white supremacy in our society’s institutions. They underscore that the police do not protect communities of colour in the same way they do white people.’
He went on to slam the police for having failed to protect the protesters, and for having ‘enabled white militia members to become armed vigilantes.’
‘Rittenhouse’s trial,’ he continued, ‘highlights an urgent need for reform for both police and the criminal legal system. The system is broken, and it desperately needs to be fixed.’
These sentiments were echoed by Brandon Buskey of the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, who said that the ‘violence in Kenosha is not an anomaly, but rather endemic to a system built upon white supremacy.’