"I can't believe how they railroaded that poor man!" A friend of mine said after watching the 10 episode Netflix series The Making of A Murderer. "How can such things go on in a free country?"
Good question.
"Making of A Murderer" is, perhaps, the most compelling true-life crime series this year. If you haven't seen it already, you really should take the time to watch it.
[Note: If you plan on seeing the series, you should probably not read any further as this article contains spoilers.]
While trying to maintain a balanced approach to the subject, the filmmakers clearly imply that convicted murderer Steven Avery has been framed for a crime he did not commit. For my own part, I sided with the filmmakers. I believe that Steven Avery is the victim of a corrupt and biased legal system. Still, whether he's guilty or not, there's no denying that substantial police misconduct occurred in both felony crimes that Steven Avery was convicted of.
To briefly summarize the circumstances behind all this, Avery and his family were something of the "black sheep" of the small Wisconsin community of Manitowoc County. Although, the Averys ran a legal business, they were poor and less educated than their more affluent neighbors.
The Avery's oldest son, Steven was an outgoing, but edgy young man, who lived with his parents on the outskirts of town where they ran a sprawling junkyard. Steven was a bit of a hellraiser, and had a few relatively minor felonies (breaking into a bar for a drink, exposing himself and pointing an unloaded gun at a family member during an argument) on his record.
These small brushes with the law helped feed a wide-spread local reputation that Steven and the whole Avery family were "no good." Innuendo took a much darker turn when young Steven was accused of raping a young woman at a nearby lake shore. Convicted largely on the questionable testimony of the victim who did not recall the attack very clearly, but was encouraged by police to pick Steven out of a line up (after she was shown his photo and told he was the prime suspect), Steve was sent to prison for 32 years.
The fact that 16 witnesses placed Steven dozens of miles away at the time of the attack didn't matter to the police: he was an Avery after all, a "bad apple" - of course he did it.
But Steven Avery continued to insist that he was innocent.
Under normal circumstances, Steven would have disappeared forever into the gaping maw of an ever hungry criminal justice system, a forgotten man, wasting away forever behind bars. But in 2003, evidence emerged that he was telling the truth. DNA evidence emerged that cleared Steve as a suspect. Furthermore, in the ensuing investigation it became clear that the Manitowoc Police Department withheld information for years that another suspect in their custody was the real rapist!
Upon his release after 18 years for a crime he did not commit, Steven began pursuing a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the police department that rushed to judgement and framed him. As the lawsuit was just reaching the courts (and Steve was on the verge of receiving an enormous settlement that would have bankrupted the city), an incredibly bizarre series of events unfolded. A young woman, Teresa Halbach, disappeared in Manitowoc County. Upon investigation, it was learned that she had visited Steven Avery's junkyard shortly before her disappearance to photograph a car in his junkyard.
Police investigators immediately pounced on Steven Avery once again as the prime suspect, although he would seem to have little motivation to murder this random woman. Citizen search teams (members of the same community that always despised the Avery's) were allowed to ramble all over the Avery property looking for clues for the missing woman. After being "guided by the holy spirit" (although it seems more likely they were tipped off by someone in the Manitowoc PD), a few of these good citizens "stumbled" upon Teresa Halbach's abandoned SUV sitting right in the middle of the Avery junkyard, ineptly hidden under a couple of loose tree branches (which is very strange when you consider that Steven Avery actually owned a car crushing machine and if the car was evidence against him in Halbach's murder he could have easily destroyed it completely at any time rather than throwing some branches on it and leaving it in plain sight.). Later, tests revealed small samples of Steven's blood were inside the vehicle. Bits of the victim's bones were also suddenly discovered in a fire pit behind Steve's house.
Police arrested Steven and poured over his property - but to their surprise, could find no other supporting evidence linking him to the crime. This was explained away by the authorities who said Steven was a criminal mastermind who expertly cleaned up the entire crime scene - although why the "criminal mastermind" would neglect to destroy Teresa Halbach car, or not even bother to clean up his "bloodstains" from the vehicle's interior is anyone's guess.
Just like before, Steven Avery continued to insist that he was innocent and was being framed.
After a few months of investigation turned up no further evidence and Steven hired really good lawyers to defend himself, things got even stranger. Even though the Manitowoc County Police Department was not officially investigating the crime (as the victim was from a different jurisdiction), they were allowed to come onto Steven Avery's property to assist in the investigation. Yes, that's right, the very officers who had withheld crucial evidence in the first rape trial against Steven, and who were being sued by Steven Avery for their inappropriate conduct (and had a perfect motivation to see him permanently behind bars), were allowed to roam all over his property to hunt down "new" evidence against him.
At first these officers found nothing when they were under the watchful eye of an independent investigator, but then, magically, when they were left alone, these officers discovered a pair of keys belonging to the victim's SUV laying in plain sight in Steven's bedroom - a room that numerous officers from the original police department had combed before and found nothing.
Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, Steven Avery's nephew, Brendan Dassey, confessed to being an accomplice to the crime, describing a brutal rape and murder of Teresa Halbach at the orders of his uncle, Steven Avery. It turns out that investigators had been hounding the young man, who clearly had below average intelligence, for weeks, demanding that he "tell the truth." In all his interviews up to that point, Brendan Dassey, insisted that neither he nor Steven Avery had anything to do with the murder. But after investigators lied to his mother, and tricked the confused teenager into being interviewed at the police station for hours on end without a lawyer they dragged a supposed "confession" out of him.
During the videotaped interview, the police bully and intimidate the mentally challenged youth non-stop for hours. When he insists on sticking to his version of the story - that nothing happened - they tell him he's lying and that he's going to go to jail, unless he agrees to say "yes" to the things they tell him. They promise Brendan if does so, he won't get in any trouble and can go home. Brendan seems unable to process what the implications of what they're asking him to do, but exhausted and scared, he finally agrees to a story that is literally fed to him almost line by line by the detectives. At the conclusion of the "confession," Brendan asks meekly if he can go home and watch "wrestling now" - having no idea that he's just implicated himself in a murder.
Then, things go from bad to even worse. When Brendan Dassey is finally given a court appointed lawyer, his shameless, inept attorney conspires with the prosecution to get a second "confession" out of the mentally challenged teen. Brendan's unscrupulous lawyer actually sets him up with a private investigator who admits he despises the whole Avery family (whom he considers to be almost sub-human). He hates them with such passion that he wants to "end their gene pool" by putting their men behind bars so they "can't reproduce" - and this is the investigator hired by Brendan's public defender to help him.
Brendan's attorney abandons him alone in a room with this supposed defense "investigator" so the man can bully the teen into a second confession - one that doesn't, by the way, really match his first confession - since he's just agreeing to another story being feed to him. The public defender's conduct is so abysmal that the judge finally does the decent thing and removes him from the case, but in a stunning move he allows the two questionable "confessions" to be used against the young man anyway.
In the subsequent trials, no collaborating evidence can be found to back up the wild and crazy confession police forced out of Brendan (who described a torture scene so brutal and violent that there should have been blood sprayed all over Steven's home).
Later, it's discovered that Steven's blood in the victim's SUV most likely came from a vial of Steven's blood that the Manitowoc County police still had access to from his original false rape case. The package and blood vial are shown clearly to have been tampered with: the seal on the package is broken and there's an obvious syringe hole on the top of the original vial.
Regardless of this, the unthinkable happens: Steven Avery and his nephew are both convicted of Teresa Halbach's murder. All their appeals are denied. Now, unless new evidence emerges, once more Steven Avery faces the prospect of life in prison for another crime he might not have committed. The horror of watching a potentially innocent man be framed by the same police department twice is Kafkaesque in it's absurdity.
The documentary series fills one with sadness, fear and loathing for the corruption at the heart of the American justice system. What's remarkable also however is how the series highlights a reality that the general public normally refuses to acknowledge: that the legal system can be highly prejudiced and corrupt. The bias against Steven Avery isn't racial, it's about class and the fact that he has long been labeled "a bad apple."
Sad as it is, the tragedy of Steven Avery is nothing new. It happens to people of color and those living in poverty on a daily basis - and no one bats an eye. But make no mistake, Steven Avery is being victimized by the very same forces that destroy the lives of African American and Latinos every day. Instead of racial discrimination, in the case of Steven Avery, it's the discrimination of class and innuendo. The Avery family is "white trash" and "scum" in the eyes of their community. Cops are above reproach, if they say the Avery's are criminals: then they're criminals - just like blacks and Latinos are always "rapists and thugs."
Having said all this, one has to acknowledge that it is possible that Steven Avery is guilty. His own ex-fiance who defended him for many years recently turned on him and said she thinks he did it and that he was abusive to her throughout their two-year relationship. Maybe she's telling the truth, or perhaps she's being harassed by authorities and wants to be left alone. We'll never know for sure.
And that brings us to the most insidious part of this whole twisted tale: how corruption sullies everything it touches. Even if Steven Avery is guilty, thanks to a corrupt police department, the truth will probably never be known with certainty. The family of Teresa Halbach will never really have closure; the lingering doubts that Avery might be innocent will never go away.
It's not surprising that it takes the gross miscarriage of justice against a white victim to make my friend acknowledge something that people of color have been living with most of their lives: the gaping flaws of the criminal justice system.
Whites in this country tend not to see things this way. A recent poll for example found that whites are far more likely to see police as being "fair" and "honest" than African Americans. It makes sense; how often does an affluent white person find themselves without a lawyer, being railroaded into a confession for a crime they did not commit? How often is evidence planted in a well to do suburban family's home?
Or as the Standford Rape Case shows, a judge can actually sympathize with a guilty white criminal if he comes from a "good" home. No such sympathy is usually afforded defendants of color, nor will it be awarded to "white trash" "bad apples" like Steven Avery.
"The Making of A Murderer" says a lot about how justice and social standing play out in this country. It leaves one with a very disturbing portrait of highly flawed and biased legal system. It is must viewing for anyone who is still laboring under the delusion that the criminal justice system in this country is doing just fine and dandy work and never, ever makes a mistake. As the Black Lives Matter movement has been trying to articulate for a long time, American Justice is in need of major reforms...