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Nobody ever wins a fight.
Prosecutors in the Kyle Rittenhouse murder trial bizarrely used an image from the 1980s Patrick Swayze flick “Road House” in Monday’s closing arguments to suggest that the teen should not have “brought a gun to a fistfight.”
Kenosha County Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger showed an image of Swayze’s character Dalton preparing to fight his rival Jimmy, played by Marshall Teague, to make the case that Rittenhouse acted unreasonably by carrying out the triple shooting.
“What you don’t do is you don’t bring a gun to a fistfight. What the defendant wants you to believe is that because he’s the one who brought the gun, he gets to kill,” Binger explained to the jurors.
Swayze’s character works as cooler at a bar called the Double Deuce in the cult classic.
The scene from which the image was pulled involves a bar brawl that was broken up by a gunshot — fired by Ben Gazarra’s character, Brad Wesley.
In a later scene, Dalton, fearing for his life, kills Jimmy with his bare hands, while the movie’s climax features a trio of local residents shooting Wesley, bringing order to a lawless town.
Binger, in his court comments, compared the “Road House” bar fight to Rittenhouse fatally shooting an unarmed man, Joseph Rosenbaum, after an initial encounter, then killing Anthony Huber and wounding Gaige Grosskreutz on Aug. 25, 2020.
“Contrast this, two different scenarios. One scenario where there’s two guys who are throwing punches at one another like a bar fight. I think we’d all agree you can’t kill someone,” Binger said.
“You can’t punch the guy, knock him to the ground and then get them and strangle the life out of them. That’s murder. So what’s the difference here?” he said.
Binger argued that Rittenhouse lost the right to self-defense by using his rifle to present a danger during the encounters on the streets of Kenosha.
“You lose the right to self-defense when you’re the one that brought the gun, when you’re the one creating the danger, when you’re the one provoking other people,” he continued.
“Road House” fans on Monday pounced on the reference to the action film.
“The Roadhouse gambit! Classic legal maneuver,” one user quipped.
Another added, “Using a scene from the movie ‘Roadhouse’ to bolster your case is probably not a good strategy.”
“When the prosecution uses a photo of Patrick Swayze from Roadhouse, you are watching a circus,” another Twitter user wrote.
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