Saturday Night Live kicked off this week’s cold open with Fox News’ Justice with Judge Jeanine, featuring the inimitable Cecily Strong as the unhinged pundit/Trump acolyte Jeanine Pirro. And the first item on the menu was the verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, where the 18-year-old was acquitted on all charges after using an illegal gun to kill two people in a different state during a Black Lives Matter protest for Jacob Blake, a Black man who was shot seven times by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
“Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges. That lovable scamp was put through a nightmare of a trial just for doing the bravest thing any American can do: protecting an empty used car lot in someone else’s town,” proclaimed Pirro.
Then, Pirro brought on Judge Bruce Schroeder (Mikey Day), whose bizarrely chummy attitude toward Rittenhouse during the trial—including allowing the accused to randomly select the jurors out of a tumbler so that he would feel “in control”—raised eyebrows across the country.
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“Now, if I may say judge-to-judge, what turned me on the most was how you ruled that courtroom with an iron fist. Tell us how you did it!” asked Pirro.
“Well, it was all standard procedure. That’s why I ordered that the prosecution not use the word ‘victims,’ they were ‘rioters’; and they weren’t ‘shot,’ they were ‘ga-doinked.’ But that did not give my client an unfair advantage in any way,” Schroeder responded.
“You said ‘my client.’ Did you mean ‘the defendant?’” asked Pirro.
After Judge Schroeder bumbled through a response, Pirro brought on a pair of legal analysts—one from NPR, played by Chloe Fineman, and another from Howard University, played by Chris Redd. When the former expressed her utter shock over the verdict, exclaiming, “All we can hope for is that at this point, this will be a call to finally change the system,” Redd rolled his eyes.
“And that call will go right to voice mail, and the mailbox is full,” he fired back.
