“It’s a pretty substantial burden for the prosecution to do that and I think that’s going to be where the real challenge for them lies,” said John Gross, a clinical associate professor and the director of the Public Defender Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School.
The jury will have the all-important task of assessing whether Rittenhouse’s actions were reasonable and constituted self-defense.”We want the jury to be a check on the power of the state and to enforce community norms,” said Cecelia Klingele, an associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “So when the law requires that force is used reasonably, we want our community to decide what is or isn’t reasonable.”