The defense team for Kyle Rittenhouse, who says he was acting in self-defense when he fatally shot two people and wounded a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin last summer, filed a motion for a mistrial with prejudice on Monday before closing arguments and following alleged misconduct by the prosecution that involved withholding evidence.
The motion includes the previously raised issues of prosecutors ignoring a pretrial order that barred the presentation of certain evidence to the jury, as well as them infringing on Rittenhouse’s right to post-arrest silence. But it raises a new accusation: that the state did not properly share a critical piece of video footage with the defense.
On the fifth day of the trial, the defense alleges, prosecutors gave them video footage taken from a drone showing some of the events that transpired on Aug. 25, 2020. The prosecution, however, allegedly gave the defense a low-quality, compressed version of the video while keeping a clearer one for themselves. The defense’s copy was allegedly only 3.6 MB with a 480 x 212 resolution, while the state’s video was 11.2 MB and 1,920 x 844.
