Minimize Kyle Rittenhouse Decide Some Slack, The Judicial Conduct Code Doesn’t Prohibit Having A Persona

As a practicing attorney, I kind of cringe saying anything about any judge. That being said, here we go, Rule 8.2 of the Rules of Professional Conduct in mind: the Kyle Rittenhouse judge isn’t that bad.

Look, a lot of the things Judge Bruce Schroeder has done aren’t my taste. For instance: failing to silence your phone before court, and then when it rings revealing to everyone that your ringtone is “Proud to be an American” (also known as “God Bless the U.S.A.”) by Lee Greenwood? He’s definitely guilty of the charge of being tacky.

But while I realize that song has been co-opted by sketchy right-wing movements lately, it came out in 1984. We were still fighting the Soviet Union in the Cold War. That was the year after Schroeder was appointed to the bench (by a Democrat, if you were wondering), and the year before I was born. During my often-tedious Midwestern childhood, I believe I heard Greenwood crooning out “God Bless the U.S.A.” approximately 16,000 times at various Memorial Day programs, basketball games, bake sales, car washes, and just about anything else that took place ever.

If you asked the average Wisconsinite whether “Proud to be an American” by Lee Greenwood reminded them more of recent Trump rallies, or the 10,000 times they heard it in other settings over the past three decades, well, first you’d have to hum a few bars of it because they probably wouldn’t remember the song title or the artist, then they’d shrug and say something like, “Oh, golly, I didn’t know they played that ‘God Bless the U.S.A.’ song at the Trump things, good tune though, for sure.” I wouldn’t read too much into this song being a Midwestern judge’s ringtone, and well-educated coastal elites yelling on Twitter that liking that song somehow automatically makes you racist sure isn’t going to help that problem we liberals have with getting middle-of-the-country folks on our side.

Then there was Schroeder’s awkward pre-lunch joke, “I hope the Asian food isn’t coming … isn’t on one of those boats in Long Beach Harbor.” He was referring to the supply chain issues currently afflicting the United States. Apparently some people thought he was implicitly blaming Asian people for that supply chain backlog. Which … isn’t really what that sentence said. Yeah, he didn’t need to tell everyone what kind of food they were ordering that day, and the joke didn’t land. But you really have to try to read that as racist, rather than as a 75-year-old man, a bit unartfully perhaps, referring to “Asian food” as “Asian food.” Again, I’d cautiously propose that we not alarm the Midwesterners by calling them all racists every time someone utters the name of one of Earth’s seven continents.

Of course, there has been more substantive criticisms of Schroeder’s performance. He yelled at a prosecutor — but excused the jury first, and anyone in the legal field could tell you that prosecutor was indeed out of line. Even though, in my humble opinion, Kyle Rittenhouse is an odious little shit who should go to prison, we don’t use someone’s choice to exercise his right to remain silent against him in an American court regardless of what he’s being accused of. Schroeder dismissed the firearm possession count against Rittenhouse — but that charge only applies to short-barreled weapons, which Rittenhouse’s rifle was not (makes sense if you understand that thousands of Midwestern teenagers legally possess long-barreled guns every hunting season). Schroeder stopped in the middle of jury instructions — but that is what you’re supposed to do as a judge if you encounter additional potential problems with the jury instructions as you’re reading them.

No trial is perfect, and no judge is perfect. Judges are fallible human beings, just like the rest of us. But all of Schroeder’s substantive rulings so far have been at least arguably correct from a legal perspective, and even his offbeat comments have been mildly off-putting at worst. The guy’s doing his best to make sure this is a fair trial with a result that doesn’t get overturned on appeal, and sometimes that involves protecting a defendant’s rights. He’s also been trying to not make trial a painfully boring slog for the other people in the courtroom, which should be commended rather than discouraged, if you ask me.

While Schroeder hasn’t been flawless, it’s not helpful for a left-wing Twitter mob to jump down his throat every time he does something that could be perceived as favorable to Kyle Rittenhouse. The presumption of innocence is part of this whole judicial system we’ve set up. Cut the judge some slack, he’s doing his job.

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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.