Court TV
I’m not a court reporter, but like many of us, I’ve been watching a seemingly endless parade of trials. So much of what makes front-page news relates to the work we do here at the Tracker.
I followed the Kenosha, Wisconsin, trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, until Nov. 19, when he was acquitted of first-degree intentional homicide and four other felony charges for killing two men and wounding a third in August 2020.
At that time, Kenosha was the site of heightened Black Lives Matter and anti-police brutality protests after a white police officer shot Jacob Blake, a Black resident, during a summer of ongoing civil unrest that followed the May death of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of a white police officer in Minnesota.
In response to the jury verdict, protests broke out or were planned in multiple cities across the United States, including Kenosha, Dallas, Chicago, New York and Portland. The Tracker documented three journalists assaulted while covering the Rittenhouse verdict protests, all in Portland.
I followed the great reporting by KCUR and The Kansas City Star around the exoneration of Kevin Strickland, a Black man, of a triple homicide conviction after 43 years in a Missouri jail. I followed as a former KC journalist, because this man has been jailed the entirety of my life and because some of the evidence that overturned his conviction — in addition to an eyewitness recantation and his insistence of innocence for more than four decades — brought home for me the importance of diverse representation in the judicial system.
The same day Strickland went free in the Midwest — Nov. 23 — a Georgia jury began deliberations in the case of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man shot to death in February 2020. On the second day of deliberations, the jury found three men, all white, guilty of murder and other charges. Arbery’s death, and the graphic video that accompanied it, helped fuel widespread demonstrations and unrest across the country in the spring and summer of 2020.
From 2020 into 2021, the Tracker documented more than 1000 incidents — including more than 600 assaults and 150 arrests — of journalists while reporting from Black Lives Matter protests across the country.
Also on the 23rd, a jury in Charlottesville, Virginia, found the organizers of a white nationalist rally in 2017, Unite the Right, partially responsible for the violence that occurred there, including the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who died when a car rammed into a group of counterprotesters.
Across those several days in August 2017, the Tracker documented four journalists assaulted while covering the marches in Charlottesville and Richmond.
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