Making a Murderer: a hers and his rant.

You guys.  This has gotten out of hand.  I can't open up any social media feed or even an internet browser without being bombarded with more thoughts, more articles, more about the Steven Avery case.  I understand how pop culture works, and usually I embrace it. I like to be in the know, and I like the reprieve that silly pop culture stories provide from the daily grind.  But I think we're treading in dangerous water here, folks.  This true crime genre is compelling, addicting, and guaranteed to incite a reaction. And in this day and age, when everyone has a platform, everyone has a place to express their opinions, (yes I see the irony) I fear we're forgetting that most of us are not in fact journalists, or attorneys, or judges, or even very smart, as a collective.


I loved the first season of Serial, NPR's take on the true crime podcast genre.  Loved it.  I got my husband and family addicted and we have enjoyed debating pieces of the trial the podcast brought to light.  It was fantastically compelling, and I consumed it as a piece of entertainment, never once thinking that based on listening to a 12 part podcast, I was suddenly an expert on the law, or qualified to speak on the Adnan Syed case with any degree of authority.  Because I'm not an attorney.  Or a journalist. Or any type of expert in any sort of legal field.

Fast forward a year and America has a new series to binge consume, and now, suddenly, the audience of this show has turned into experts on how the legal system failed an ex-con and his nephew.  Over 336,000 people have signed a petition to get him a Presidential pardon.

Except, did you guys know that, "The president can only pardon federal criminal convictions, and Avery was convicted of a crime against the state of Wisconsin, not against the United States. As a result, there’s not really much the White House can do in this situation — the Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, is the only one in this case with the power to pardon Avery." (Department of Justice)

But by all means, hop on the bandwagon and sign away.  Seems like a productive use of your time.

I don't want to be snarky, but we must be careful of the conclusions we draw from sensationalized sources.  This series, much like Serial, does not include all of the facts, simply because it cannot.  The producers of the series say as much in an interview with Rolling Stone: 

Demos: We tried to include as much of the trial as we thought viewers would tolerate...As storytellers it's in our interest to show conflict.

Ricciardi: Wisconsin has an expansive public records law. Any materials generated by state or county officials are part of the public domain.

With these two quotes, Demos says she telling the story for max entertainment, and Riccaiardi has invited you to look up the pieces of the case they left out.  Why? They DIDN'T INCLUDE IT ALL BECAUSE IT WOULD HAVE TAKEN TOO LONG AND PROVED TO BE MUCH LESS SCINTILLATING ENTERTAINMENT FOR YOUR HOLIDAY BREAK.

Sorry.  Reigning in the snark.

I happen to be from the area where this crime was committed, and what I've learned is that the fallout from the viewers' snap judgment of this show is hurtful and harmful.  Unlike Serial, where the family of Hae Min Lee were characters that existed in the confines of my smart phone, the players in Making a Murderer are real. My husband is an attorney and he told me, after appearing in court last week, that certain judges and sheriffs are getting hate mail and threats for the way a case was handled TEN YEARS AGO.  That makes a lot of sense, America.  Well done.

I'm not saying this show isn't worthy of discussion.  It is. What I can appreciate about series like these is the fact that we have the freedom to explore and question our justice system.  We are talking about things we wouldn't otherwise talk about.  I'm glad to learn more about the judicial process and how it works, and how and when it clearly doesn't.  I'm glad these filmmakers and podcasters have a voice to tell their story.  All of these are good things.  What scares me is the impulsive rush by the consumers of this media to act, comment, and condemn without first thinking critically about the givens of a situation. The fact that you watched this show and reached a conclusion about the trial doesn't mean you are an expert on the legal process or a vigilante for justice.  It means you like TV.  18 months from now I can't imagine this series will be anything more than a flash in the pan, a distant memory, a "Huh I wonder what happened with that guy from that hick town...." but then we're going to turn on Netflix or Amazon and see a new series that will incite us about something newly unjust, and Steven Avery will fade into the fauna of American pop culture.  People, don't forget to think.  THINK CRITICALLY.  Know your facts before you waste your time signing a pardon that can't do jack sh*t assert expertise about something, anything really.  Understand your limitations.  It's okay to not know, and it's good to question. By all means, watch the show.  Talk about it with your friends and family.  And then remember that you are a teacher, or an actor, or a temp worker, and you're probably not qualified to make any sort of judgment call on this matter, and that, thankfully, justice is not served at your hands.

And now, my husband:

I'm a liberal.  And aside from "my side" being so very, very wrong in this matter, what bothers me about this the most is that there are real and obvious examples of problems within our criminal justice system but the only cases anyone cares about are the ones easily and readily consumed in entertaining, pre-packaged formats.  As Erin mentioned above, I enjoyed Serial. To me, it seemed fairly obvious from the materials presented that Mr. Syed killed that young woman but the State failed to prove its case.  After watching MaM, I realized that THIS GENRE IS ENTERTAINMENT.  I don’t know why I didn’t, consciously, understand that with Serial.  But I clearly did not.  Now I do. So I have no idea, really, what happened in the Syed case.  

MaM is utterly preposterous as something that is meant to “inform” anyone of anything other than the Avery defense's position and strategies.  We can all agree that this show could have been 6 episodes long (there's more fat to cut here than any Sopranos season).  Instead of all those useless shots of Mr. Avery's parents walking around, the filmmakers could (and had they cared about presenting both sides, SHOULD) have given us some salient facts that show Mr. Avery is guilty.  To wit:

• Mr. Avery’s sweat DNA was on the RAV 4’s hood and the car key, so who cares about the blood, the Sheriff's Department could not have planted the sweat.  
• Nothing is made of the fact that Ms. Halbach’s blood was on that bullet, and the Sheriff’s Department didn’t have her blood to plant (unless, of course, you are crazy and think law enforcement killed her to put Mr. Avery back in prison - if so, tell me MORE about how President Bush was behind 9/11).  I know the defense tried to obfuscate the results by saying the technician's DNA was on the bullet, but, c'mon.  The presence of the technician's DNA does not magically cancel out the presence of Halbach's DNA.  
• There were three phone calls made by Mr. Avery to Ms. Halbach on October 31, 2005 (the day she went missing), and that on two of those occasions he blocked his number using *67.  
• Ms. Halbach had asked her boss to never send her back to the Avery compound because Mr. Avery creeped her out.  
• Mr. Dassey told the investigators about Mr. Avery disconnecting the car battery (corroborated by Mr. Avery’s sweat on the hood).  They did not feed Dassey that - he came up with that detail by himself.
• Mr. Dassey's mother stated that her son helped Mr. Avery clean up his garage around October 31, 2005, and that Mr. Dassey's jeans were stained with bleach as a result.
• We did not hear from any expert on car crushers to explain that Mr. Avery would have had to remove, at the very least, the engine from the RAV 4 before crushing it, and that he would have needed to forklift the vehicle into the crusher.  Things that would have gone noticed by his two brothers who ran the place and operated the crusher on the other side of the property.  
• You don’t know about how Dassey was “roughed up” by the Marinette County Sheriff’s Department (in the words of the judge of his case, which he related to me a few weeks ago) and said nothing for hours, indicating he wasn’t as helpless and dumb as they make it seem in the show.  
• When he called Auto Trader, Mr. Avery requested Ms. Halbach by name and that she had to come that day. Perhaps selling that minivan was an emergency?  
• Is there mention of Avery’s drawings of a torture chamber he wanted to build in his house when he got out prison for the wrongful conviction?  
• Mr. Avery was barred from seeing his fiancé for 72 hours (in 2004) after she reported domestic violence but later recanted her story to keep him from being formally charged with anything more than a disorderly conduct ordinance violation (he did not contest the DC).  
• There were three (3!) alleged rapes (and one affidavit) in the 2 years Mr. Avery was free before he murdered Ms. Halbach.  
• And, oh, did you noticed how the filmmakers distorted his past criminal transgressions?  Yeah, he didn’t just throw his cat over a fire.  He poured gasoline on it and tossed it into a bonfire.  And he didn’t just hold up his cousin at gunpoint after running her off the road.  No, that was precipitated by him running outside, morning after morning, dropping his pants and furiously masturbating on the highway when his cousin drove by.  When he refused to stop, she reported it to the Sheriff’s Department.  THEN he ran her off the road, put a shotgun in her face, and decided not to kill her when he saw a baby in the backseat.

I could keep going, but my wife would like to preserve some of her cred as a blogger who doesn't have mile-long posts.

Now, the filmmakers may have left some of that out because it wasn’t directly related to the case, but they sure did put a lot of stuff that was favorable to Mr. Avery that had nothing to do with the case.  (I laughed when I heard the line "I think I had a good life... til all the trouble started.")  This is, obviously, because the filmmakers want you to be on Mr. Avery's side.

I’m not a criminal attorney.  But if you told me that a woman was murdered and her remains were found in the backyard of a felon’s property who had requested that she come to his property on the day she went missing and said felon was the last known person to have seen her, well, I think I’d charge him with murder with that evidence only.  But if you also told me that a bullet was found with the victim’s blood DNA on it in the felon’s garage, AND that the bullet matched the ballistics on the felon’s illegal rifle that hung over his bed.  That’s about it for me.  Stop right there. You don't need anything else.  All the other stuff is white noise.  White.  Noise.  And yet, it’s all the other stuff that the filmmakers and Mr. Avery’s (dream) defense team focus on.  And the reason they do that is because when the prosecution has motive, opportunity, the murder weapon, and the body on the defendant’s land, you have nothing to go on except white noise.

Look, I live here.  I followed this. You couldn’t run into an attorney in this town without talking about it.  And everyone, and I mean everyone, knew this was a slam-dunk case.  But Mr. Avery had the benefit of not one, but TWO of the best defense attorneys in the state (from different law firms, no less – which is CRAZY).  And they were magnificent.  They were like Mozart or Chopin.  That was money well-spent.  Think about it - the only thing people who watched this thing are talking about is the white noise.  Those attorneys executed their strategy brilliantly.  

In fact, they almost let Mr. Avery get away with murder.  But they didn’t.  Thankfully.  Mr. Avery had more than a fair shake.  If you watched the show, there were complaints by Mr. Avery's attorneys that the jury pool had been tampered with by Mr. Kratz because of his "sensational" press conference.  But the evidence shows the jury was not tampered with.  Recall that when the jury left the courtroom and began deliberations, they took an initial vote, in order to see where everyone was.  Seven (7!) thought Mr. Avery was not guilty.  Two more were undecided.  And just three thought he was guilty.  If the jury had been tampered with, you would have expected to see far less jurors voting not guilty and undecided.  Instead, 75% of jurors did not think he was guilty at the outset.  And that indicates that the evidence won the day, not any tampering by Mr. Kratz during his press conferences.  Let me explain further:

The last 2 days of trial, jurors heard (closing) arguments.  On one side was the silver-tongued Cadillac Defense Team.  On the other was Mr.Kratz (I’ll put this delicately – he wasn’t the second coming of Clarence Darrow).  Most people would have left the Courtroom after those two days thinking Mr. Avery was not guilty or undecided because argument is different than evidence.  Take one guy listing a laundry list of evidence that shows guilt.  Then take two guys spinning a story of corruption and prejudice that is so compelling, the entire country has been captivated by their work.  That's how good these two guys were.  It's amazing what $240,000 buys you, isn't it?  Anyway, after that initial vote, it is the jury's job to then go back and consider the evidence.  The evidence.  They couldn't get away from the evidence.  After 3 days of reviewing the evidence: murder weapon, opportunity, motive, the body, etc., it was impossible not to convict Mr. Avery.  Impossible.  It is, truly, that obvious.  But, man, what a story those two attorneys crafted!  Bravo!

I’m not on Facebook.  The Facebook posts don’t bother me because, mostly, people are sheep with this stuff.  But, man, when I started hearing smart people like Chuck Klosterman talking about this (to be fair, he did recognize that there had to be more to the story than the filmmakers gave the viewer), it just made me mad and I had to write something.  
(Honey, thanks for letting me vent.)