Judge tentatively bars jurors from weighing Lachman fire suppression efforts
Jury selection in the federal retrial of Jonathan Rinderknecht is set to begin Monday at a courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. Rinderknecht, 30, is a former Uber driver who returns to court four months after his first trial ended with a hung jury. He has pleaded not guilty to destruction of property by means of fire, arson affecting property used in interstate commerce and timber set afire.
Federal prosecutors say Rinderknecht started the Palisades fire, which killed 12 people and ravaged thousands of buildings. The fire was raging in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles amid high winds on Jan. 7, 2025.
Federal prosecutors asked the court to explicitly instruct retrial jurors not to consider the adequacy of the Los Angeles fire department’s efforts to suppress the Lachman fire in Rinderknecht’s case. A judge tentatively granted the request, according to court documents.
Rinderknecht’s defense team was unsuccessful in trying to block the retrial jury from hearing descriptions of the AI-generated images depicting a burning city that he created with ChatGPT. In a recent court filing, his lawyers wrote:
“The images are not Mr. Rinderknecht’s statements. They are output a program produced in response to his instructions, over a series of attempts, and the prompts themselves show that the program did not produce what he asked for. What the images depict is therefore poor evidence of what he intended, while a picture of a burning landscape shown to a jury in a case about the Palisades Fire carries obvious emotional force.”
On 31 December, Rinderknecht dropped a passenger in the Los Angeles enclave before climbing on foot to a hillside clearing, law enforcement officials said. They said he ignited a brush fire that ballooned into the 8-acre Lachman fire. Firefighters extinguished the Lachman blaze on Jan. 2, but embers smoldered underground for days before erupting into the Palisades fire.
Months before the Palisades fire, Rinderknecht asked ChatGPT to create a dystopian image of a city burning down as an apathetic wealthy class watched on. During the first trial, prosecutors portrayed him as a lonely and angry person lashing out at the world over grievances that included failed romances and a general disdain for the rich. In closing arguments, prosecutor Danbee C Kim reportedly said, “He lit that fire to take back power.”
The first jury did not return a verdict. Two jurors voted to convict Rinderknecht and 10 voted not guilty. One juror who voted not guilty told reporters: “I’m not saying I don’t think there was enough evidence to say he started the first fire,” the juror said. “But say he did? I don’t see why everybody else’s negligence of doing things incorrectly, where he needs to be responsible for the whole Palisades.”
The question of the Los Angeles fire department’s culpability loomed tacitly over the first trial. Although jurors were not allowed to hear any evidence related to the department’s handling of the Lachman fire, they appeared reluctant to place the blame squarely on Rinderknecht.
The criminal case has been closely watched as victims of the Palisades fire continue to pursue damages from the city. Those claims are separate from the criminal charges, and the retrial will not decide them.