After more than eight hours of deliberations, the jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse murder trial has been dismissed for the evening after not reaching a verdict Tuesday.
Judge Bruce Schroeder dismissed the jury for the day just before 6 p.m., with the group not coming to an agreement on a verdict on the first day of deliberations.
The jury will reconvene Wednesday at 9 a.m.
Jurors were given the case just after 9 a.m. Tuesday following final instructions from the judge, and worked through most of the morning and afternoon, stopping for lunch around 1 p.m.
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The jury made multiple requests to the court for extra copies of different parts of the jury instructions, ultimately asking for copies for each juror of the 36-page document.
The day started with Rittenhouse reaching into a bin and picking the numbers of six jurors, who were then dismissed into the alternate pool.
There are five counts remaining against Rittenhouse after a weapons charge was dismissed by Schroeder during the trial.
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Rittenhouse, now 18, was in Kenosha with an AR-style semi-automatic rifle and a medical kit in what he said was an effort to protect property from the damaging demonstrations that broke out over the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, by a white Kenosha police officer last summer.
While Rittenhouse is white, as were those he shot, the case has stirred debate over vigilantism, the right to bear arms and the unrest that erupted around the U.S. that summer over the killing of George Floyd and the shooting of Blake.
Rittenhouse testified during the trial that he acted in self-defense. Wisconsin’s self-defense law allows someone to use deadly force only if “necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm,” and the jury has been tasked with deciding whether Rittenhouse believed he was in such peril, and whether that belief was reasonable under the circumstances.
