"Making a Murderer" on Netflix

Hey look at OJ--just because they planted evidence doesn't mean he didn't do it.

 

Many public defenders are highly competent and dedicated, often equal to the better private defense attorney's. Their big achilles heel (and it isn't their fault) is the large case loads they have no control over. Our state recently mandated case load standards for public defenders based on constitutional challenges. Assigned case loads have been so high that something like only 20 minutes of legal review per defendant was the norm. Enough to scan the police reports and try to get a sense of how strong the states case is and what the evidence is before discussing options with a defendant. Which is why its sad to use terms like public pretenders. Studies by judicial and bar associations and other legal interest entities have shown that in capitol crime cases (death penalty cases) public defenders have been rated as effective (and even exceeding) private boutique defense firms. Bottom line: getting arrested while poor is a more difficult uphill climb than for those with money.

 

I worked with a guy when I was in private practice who had a public defender and she was excellent at her job. If I had stayed in Cincinnati, I would have advised anyone I knew who would need a public defender to get her if they could. She was top-notch and was excellent at her job. I'm not sure if she stayed in the PD office there, but she was amazing. I think she did it because she really cared about poor peoples' rights.

Unfortunately the stories I've heard the past 18 years have not been good. It's almost like DCF, their caseloads are just to big to manage from what I've seen and heard. Getting the best deal for the client seems to be the goal for most of them now.

 

I agree with many of the point made already. For me, two things stand out.

1. Brendan Dassey was railroaded. What "his" lawyer and investigator did to him was unconscionable. Kachinski should have been disbarred for what he did -- allowing Brendan to be interrogated without counsel present, and sending his own investigator to deliberately manipulate Brendan into a confession which Kachinski then shared with the police. It is indefensible. It is malpractice. It is a violation of the most fundamental rules of professional conduct. It clearly amounts to a deprivation of Constitutional rights. Additionally, the interrogation tapes make it clear that Brendan was manipulated into a false confession. It was a textbook example of the Reid technique, which is notorious for inducing false confessions. All of the details that matched the physical facts were fed to him by the interrogators, and all the details that he spontaneously offered were wildly at odds with the physical facts.

2. Where was Teresa Halbach's blood? Plainly, the scenario in Brendan's confession never happened. If Teresa Halbach was stabbed and had her throat cut while she was restrained on Avery's bed, there would have been so much blood that it would have been impossible to remove all evidence of it, even if Avery immediately burned the entire contents of his bedroom. This obviously did not happen -- the clutter apparent only days later plainly had been building for years. And, as one of the defense investigators noted, if Teresa had been shot in Avery's garage, where the spent bullet was found, there would have been so much high-velocity blood spray in that cluttered space, and so much seepage into the cracked and porous concrete floor, that it would have been impossible to completely remove short of burning the garage to the ground.

 

I watched the whole season in one day with my girlfriend.

I'm American. She's French and we live in Paris. The only she kept saying is your country is f**ked up. There really is no reply back. The only things we see in the news here about the US are school shootings, random shootings, cops killing people, trump wanting to ban Muslims, etc. I really have no reply. Except we make better music.

 

I think that Making a Murderer touches on themes of human nature that are essentially universal. There's nothing distinctively American (or French, or Mexican, or whatever) about miscarriage of justice.

 

As a broad proposition, my perception is that the US court system is fairer and less corrupt than most countries'.

In the narrow context of police interrogation techniques, there are other countries -- in particular the UK -- that have banned the interrogation techniques shown used on Brendan Dassey, on the ground that they have no scientific basis as a truth-finding mechanism but are highly likely to lead to false confessions.

 

J'accuse…!

 

Of course Avery is guilty! Just ask Nancy Grace.

My heart really breaks for Brendan. While I'm not quite as much in the corner for Steven Avery, I believe that his nephew was certainly screwed by the system. I enjoyed the series even though it made me furious in the end.

 

This is certainly true, but I think the hidden theme of the series is the huge role class plays in American justice (and by extension, politics and media).

I have friends and family in eastern Wisconsin. Many of them -- all relatively well off and "respectable" -- have condemned this series for even daring to suggest that Avery might have gotten a raw deal. My suspicion is that they were subjected to so much inflammatory, sensational local news coverage during the trial (much of it stage-managed by the prosecution) that they’re incapable of seeing Avery and his family as anything but white-trash monsters. Never mind the flimsy evidence; he's poor, he's odd, he has a checkered past. How can he not be guilty?

As Avery himself says, "Poor people lose. Poor people lose all the time." If you want one takeaway from Murderer, that might be it.

 

Indeed.

This was, in my opinion, a clear case of the prosecution deliberately tainting the jury pool. Unfortunately, since the series has aired and received much national publicity, including Nancy Grace and others, it will probably be nearly impossible to ever get a fair trial.

In both of the jury trials for which I've been a sitting juror, the attorneys asked me if I knew either party or knew of the case. The implication was that, if so, I was assumed to be prejudged and would be excused. To do otherwise, as in this case, seems a miscarriage of justice.

 

More so than the justice system itself it would make you wonder about the American or Wisconsin Law Society or whatever your equivalent is that they wouldn't censure that public defender and his use of that bullying private investigator on his own client.

 

You mean this guy? What a putz. He's very fortunate that he's not serving time at worst, or not have a law license at best.

 

I watched it in two days.

While everything about special prosecutor, Ken Kratz, screamed "huge doughboy dork", I don't doubt that a lot of the evidence was not included in this documentary. Like a lot of them, "Paradise Lost" etc, they are coming from one particular angle and with an agenda.

What I did not care for about this series is while they make an (overly) compelling case for Avery's possible innocent and framing, they gave no effort, whatsoever, in trying to give us other possible suspects (particularly that of the other Avery clan with very checquered pasts themselves). That would, of course, enrage the Avery's and put an end to access of them and their compound.

One thing is certain Teresa Halbach was killed, but the film makes no effort to figure out who did it other than make it clear it wasn't Steve Avery. Dassey is a shame though. That shouldn't have happened but there are many individuals of lesser intelligence that get convicted every day. Jesse Misskelly of "Paradise Lost" is a prime example of this.

 

That is not really the purpose of this documentary. The makers of it even said the purpose isn't even really if he is guilty or not. It is a critique of the current justice system. That is theoretically what the police should do

 

But if important evidence is left out of the documentary, is it even an accurate portrayal of the current justice system? It's very slanted one way.

 

I agree entirely. I almost feel like someone could make an equally compelling counter-documentary about how hard it is for the justice system to put together an airtight case against a potential murderer. In that version they could include evidence that was left out of Making a Murderer, stories about Steve Avery that paint him in a less-than-sympathetic light, portions from Brendan Dassey's confession that corroborate the prosecution's case even though Brendan shouldn't have had knowledge of such details, rebuttals to questions raised by the Netflix documentary, etc. I'm not saying that Avery is guilty, but I've done enough reading about the documentary to remain less than convinced that he's innocent or even that evidence was planted. Nevertheless, it was completely stupid (not to mention suspicious) for the Manitowoc police department to get involved in the first place and for that alone I have to wonder if I'd have acquitted Avery due to police misconduct.

 

Well, when everyone on the prosecution side declines to participate in the documentary (including the folks at the Manitowoc County sheriff's department and Teresa Hallbach's brother, ex-boyfriend, and roommate), of course the results are going to seem biased.

And, sure, some of the "important evidence" that Ken Krantz claims the doc left out does raise some red flags regarding Avery's innocence (red flags, not proof), but it doesn't make the prosecution, the Manitowoc County sheriff's department, and the investigators look any less slimy and corrupt.

 

The point is that that Avery is innocent until proven guilty. The defense only has to present a case that creates reasonable doubt in the jurors minds that he may not be guilty. And that's what they did.

 

The tough thing is that ultimately it's up to the documentarians to decide what makes the final cut. By partaking you're very likely risking the fact that the filmmakers might edit your portion to serve their own cause. I'm not suggesting this is why or why not Ken Kratz and others might have chosen not to participate, but it's something to at the very least consider. And yes, like so many others I do consider Ken Kratz to give off a total "creep" vibe and find the brother to be a little odd if not downright off-putting.

 

The film left me with a lot of questions as well. Could Steven Avery have been framed? Sure, he could have. I just didn't think the documentary covered all the bases very well.

As for the prosecutors and Hallbach family and friends declining to participate, I'm sure that was upon legal advice. They really have nothing to gain by participating (other than armchair attorneys and PI's throwing it out there that its suspicious because they didn't).

 

I saw episodes 7-9 last night (the trials) and finished it this morning. As far as Steven is concerned, where is all the blood in the bedroom? If you want to believe that he did it in the garage, where is all the blood splatter from the shot(s) to the head? Or the rest of the blood from this savage cutting of throat and shooting in the head. IMO someone else killed her and created the scene that made it look like Avery killed her. A lot of people would be out a ton of money had Steven won the settlement for his first conviction and settlement. That is a huge motive for someone to pin a murder on Steven Avery. Just as the lawsuit is filed, Steven is charged with murder. I would look at the people who had the most to lose in that lawsuit.

The Manitowoc sheriff hated Steven Avery for some reason. Even when confronted with scientific evidence that led to Avery being exonerated, the sheriff wouldn't have it. Colburn and Lenk, among others, had too much to do with "evidence" showing up that they made it seem like they may have much more knowledge about what happened than they've talked about. Time will tell and Avery will be freed I'm sure.

Brendan Dassey's trial was another miscarriage of justice. His attorney's at trial tried to use the "he wasn't there" theory to get him acquitted. I'm sure sitting and listening to 4-5 or more hours of interviewing might make it harder to pull out the fact that he was told "what happened" than him saying what happened. Len Kachinsky shouldn't be practicing law (see above). Why those two men are still in prison baffles me. Why they haven't been given another trial is another huge question.

 

I'll play devil's advocate here:

According to one of Dassey's "confessions", Teresa was bound and raped in the bedroom (no blood here) and then stabbed/shot/killed in the garage. They took off the sheets and the bedding and burned both. They used bleach and other materials (like gasoline I believe) to clean the blood in the garage. Yes, this same confession was arrived upon after Branden gave previous, contradictory statements, but it does theoretically answer your questions if we are looking for theoretical answers.

The idea of someone else killing Teresa has always been my biggest problem with this whole case because now it relies on an overwhelming number of coincidences. This isn't like the sexual assault case where Steven was nowhere the crime. The bones and other (possibly planted) evidence were found on his property and he did have a bonfire that night (which he initially denied according to the investigators during their first interview with Branden). So basically in order to believe Steven didn't do it we have to believe in a "perfect storm" of events where somebody murdered this poor woman at just the right time with the idea to frame Steven, with the police coming along and finishing the task on the killer's behalf. Maybe it is indeed what happened, but on the other hand it does require a certain suspension of disbelief. Furthermore, I find it odd that Branden is so consistently being presented as having been coerced when it seems relatively obvious that he was involved somehow and that at least some of what he was saying was true. There's the fact that his cousin was the one who sold him out in the first place and he does offer up certain details that only someone who was there would theoretically know (seeing the body in the back of the jeep for instance, or verifying that he did in fact confess to his cousin Kayla). Viewers are finding it so hard to believe that Branden at the very least saw a body in the fire, but they seem to have no problem believing that he took part in "framing" Steven Avery, which seems like something well beyond Branden's means. I also found it strikingly odd that Branden later retracts his story not by saying the investigator's planted ideas in his head, but that he lifted the premise from a book he read, that book being an adult novel (Kiss the Girls)--he doesn't exactly come across as the avid reader.

This is the glaring problem for the police and exactly why they should've stayed far away from the crime scene after Teresa's car was found. On the other hand, the documentary really doesn't touch upon Steven Avery's dark side. He points a gun in his cousin's face and the documentary more or less uses that as the sole reason for all his future quandaries with the police. But maybe Steven Avery's reputation was far worse. For example, that cat he haphazardly "threw over a fire"? Based on what I've read, he and a friend in fact poured gasoline over the cat and lit it on fire. One version sounds almost accidental--the other version sounds homicidal. His own ex-fiance Jodi has recently come out claiming he was a "monster" who most likely committed the murder. Again, I'm not saying he's guilty, but I'm quite sure there's a side of Steven Avery that has yet to be fully exposed to the viewing public.

Should Branden have gotten a retrial? Definitely. Otherwise I'm not sure what you're saying here. Are you saying that Branden was told to say what happened or not? If not, then why was his conviction baffling to you?