The judge overseeing Kyle Rittenhouse's homicide trial barred MSNBC staff from entering his courthouse in Wisconsin after a person affiliated with the network was pulled over by police near a jury van.
The judge is sitting in front of a large video monitor while attorneys argue about a video.
The images are from the same company.
A man who claimed to be an NBC or MSNBC producer was pulled over by police for running a red light and told officers he was assigned to follow a bus carrying jurors.
MSNBC has been banned from entering the courthouse for the rest of the Rittenhouse trial because of an issue that is still under investigation.
NBC News confirmed to Forbes that a person was given a traffic citation near the jury van, but the person never contacted or photographed the jurors, and never photographed or intended to photograph them.
There was no security breach regarding the jury, despite the fact that the person who claimed to work for a national news outlet was given traffic citations.
NBC News will cooperate with any investigation.
It would go without saying that someone who is following a jury bus is very serious.
The key background.
The Rittenhouse case is being decided by a jury. The 18-year-old was charged with first-degree intentional homicide and several other counts for fatally shooting two people and injuring a third during a protest over the police shooting of JacobBlake in August 2020. The shooting and trial have captured national attention, with commentators on the right backing Rittenhouse's self-defense claims while critics on the left see him as a vigilante, but the court has pushed to insulate jurors from the divisive discourse surrounding their work. Some potential jurors weren't empaneled because they already had strong opinions on the incident, the Associated Press reported. The judge has warned jurors not to discuss the trial or read about it for the duration of the case, and two weeks ago he removed a juror for making a joke about the shooting of the deputy.
Sometimes jurors in high-profile criminal trials are isolated from outside contact, but not in the Rittenhouse case.
