Gun charge dropped in divisive, closely watched US murder trial

CHICAGO, United States

A teenager facing two counts of homicide in a hotly-debated US trial caught a break from the judge on Monday, just as the jury is about to decide his fate.

Judge Bruce Schroeder dismissed a charge of illegal gun possession against 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse in the trial in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a city about an hour's drive north of Chicago.

Rittenhouse had been accused of illegally possessing an AR-15 assault rifle when he shot two men dead, and wounded a third, during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Kenosha last summer. Demonstrations, sometimes violent, had broken out after a Kenosha police officer shot an unarmed Black man.

Rittenhouse claims he was invited to the streets of Kenosha by property owners last August, to help with protection, after a night of looting and fires. He says he shot the three men in self-defense after all three came towards him. Supporters of him from around the country raised around $2 million dollars for his bail money.

The prosecution says Rittenhouse had no business being there, 20 miles from his hometown, that Rittenhouse was, in fact, was the aggressor, and that he was part of a vigilante mob determined to intimidate Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

Legal experts said of the half-dozen charges facing Rittenhouse, the gun charge seemed the easiest to prove, since Rittenhouse, then 17, admitted to getting the gun from a friend, before leaving his home in Illinois and travelling to Wisconsin the day of the shooting.

Rittenhouse's defense team argued that Wisconsin's law on gun possession by minors was written too vaguely and the judge agreed. But the prosecution argued, unsuccessfully, that the spirit of the law was still clear: that minors should not be allowed to possess assault rifles.

The gun charge was a misdemeanor, but it came with the possibility of 12 month jail sentence.

The prosecution did get boost of its own on Monday. The judge ruled that on one of the homicide charges against Rittenhouse, if the jury cannot reach a unanimous verdict, they now have the option to find him guilty on a slightly lesser homicide charge. That increases the odds that Rittenhouse might be convicted on that charge.

The jury is expected to start deliberating late Monday or early Tuesday. The Wisconsin National Guard, as well as local police, have been put on alert, in case any violence breaks out over the eventual verdict.

Anadolu Agency photographer Tayfun Coskun was present at the scene of the shootings, and documented the incident in photos that were used by the prosecution as evidence. He was asked to give testimony as well.