How the defense for Rittenhouse and Arbery's killers opened a dangerous door for vigilantism

Kyle Rittenhouse took the stand in his own murder trial on Thursday, forced to answer why he shot and killed two people during a Black Lives Matter protest last year in Wisconsin. His trial coincides with that of the three men charged with the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery.

Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law, and Dean Strang, a Loyola University-Chicago law professor and the attorney known from the "Making A Murderer" series, joined Jim Braude on Greater Boston to discuss these cases of white vigilantism.

The guests argued that defense in the Rittenhouse trial benefited from a pre-trial ruling that barred prosecutors from referring to any of the people shot as victims, while allowing for the defense to refer to them as looters or arsonists. Gertner said those decisions gave more power to the Rittenhouse defense's argument that he acted because he believed there was a crime being committed.

"What that does is to imply it's OK to shoot people who are committing crimes when you're a civilian," she said.

That question of power and, specifically, the issue of citizens' arrests is central to the defense of those charged in Arbery's death. While Georgia repealed its law after Arbery's death, these statutes still exist in other states.

"Citizens' arrest statutes are long outdated and dangerous if indeed they ever had any legitimate purpose. I think it was a racially loaded and racially intended statute at the time to allow white people to control Black people," Strang said. "Today, in my view, police powers ought to be exercised by the police — and we ought to be focusing on how they exercise police powers. The idea that a 17-year-old, or for that matter a 57-year-old, is out, self-appointed, exercising police powers of arrest is terrible."

Gertner and Strang agreed that while these cases address specific instances of vigilantism, in the long term, it's a cultural problem.

"Juries come to the table with all their prejudices, and I think we're seeing that play out in the Rittenhouse case."

WATCH: How the defense for Rittenhouse and Arbery's killers has opened a dangerous door for vigilantism