Kyle Rittenhouse Juror Excused Over Jacob Blake Joke

It took only one day for a jury to be selected to preside over the murder trial of 18-year-old Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse—but maybe court officials should have taken a little more time with the process. 

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After all, in contrast, it took two and a half weeks for a jury to be selected for the murder trial of the three white men accused of hunting down and killing Ahmaud Arbery, only for it to end in 11 white people and just one Black juror being chosen.

If the jury selected in the Rittenhouse case which also turned out to be overwhelmingly white would have been chosen a little more carefully, maybe it wouldn’t have included a white man who was so confident in his unmitigated caucasity that he thought it appropriate to share a joke with a sheriff’s deputy outside the courtroom about Jacob Blake, the Black man whose police-involved shooting caused the unrest that had Rittenhouse playing white trash Batman in the first place.

According to CBS Chicago, the now-former juror who has only been publicly referred to as “Juror #7” declined to repeat the joke to Kenosha County Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder upon request, but prosecutors reported that he asked the deputy, “Why did the Kenosha police shoot Jacob Blake 7-times? Because they ran out of bullets.”

Not only was the joke racist, insensitive, and a stupid as hell joke to tell to a deputy right outside of a courtroom, but it just wasn’t funny at all. There was no pun, double entendre or even an ironic twist in this virtually punchline-less riddle—just a violent implication that a Black man would have had more bullets in him if the cop that shot him had a fuller clip. 

But the would-be juror, who was excused Thursday, certainly thought it was funny. He also at least pretended to think it was irrelevant to Rittenhouse’s trial.

“It had nothing to do with the case,” he reportedly told the judge while being seemingly oblivious to the obvious fact that if not for the Blake shooting none of us would even know the name, Kyle Rittenhouse.

At the end of the day, it’s painfully obvious that this white man knows well how racist the U.S. justice system is—he just didn’t know he couldn’t joke about it out loud.