When the news broke of Rittenhouse's shootings, my initial thought was the same as lots of other people--that he was likely going to jail for the rest of his life. But, I wanted to hold off on judgment until I had more details.

A week or two after the news broke, video came out that showed Rittenhouse fleeing, and I predicted at that point that he'd be acquitted. It seemed like a weak case for the prosecution.

But they forged ahead, and I started to wonder what they might have up their sleeves. The prosecution isn't required to try their case in the media, and wise prosecutors usually won't. Maybe there'd been some bad behaviour. Maybe some threats. Maybe something else. An eye witness who showed a shooting several seconds after a surrender, or something else.

What we've been watching is what looked like a weak case proceeding to completely fall apart. It's been an absolute shameful shambles.

It's also falling apart in ways that should have been entirely predictable. Sometimes a case falls apart because a prosecution witness turns out to be unexpectedly bad, or evidence vanishes, or there's some argument that excludes key evidence that no one spotted. This was none of those things. The prosecution was relying on unsavoury witnesses that they had to have known had serious skeletons, because those skeletons weren't in their closets. Those skeletons were in publicly filed materials, or posted online for anyone to see.

The prosecution has been relying heavily on witnesses who were clearly not sympathetic to the prosecution at all, and whose testimony quite predictably landed in favour of Rittenhouse in the end.

As the trial goes on, what we see is apparently more and more flailing and desperate attempts to make something land. Anything. They tried to have a photographer today contradict Grosskreutz' own testimony about what Grosskreutz was doing. This is sheer madness. The trial has devolved into this weird surreal zombie horror story of a trial that simply will not die notwithstanding the fact that it's already taken numerous lethal wounds.

The only thing sustaining the prosecution now is politics. If Rittenhouse was a name you'd never heard, this case would have been dumped by now into the crapper where it belongs.