I am 6 or 7 episodes in. What a crazy case. I really didn't want to watch it because it's too much like work, but my friends keep begging me to watch because they know I used to work on post-conviction petitions pretty regularly, so I gave it a shot. It really is pretty nuts. I've seen a fair amount of police misconduct in my short legal career, but what happened to Avery on the Beerntsen case is pretty nuts.
Btw, I saw Beerntsen speak at an event on wrongful convictions at Northwestern Law School. It was fascinating. She basically said there may have been a conspiracy, she has no idea ... she just knows that she wasn't consciously a part of it at all. She really believed with her whole heart and mind that Steven Avery was the guy who attacked her, and she felt incredibly horrible and guilty when she learned the truth. Apparently she speaks about the case regularly to try and raise awareness of eyewitness unreliability.
I'll reserve judgment until I finish the series, but one thing I'll say is that the prosecution does not have to prove, as some posters seem to think, that every detail of their theory is true. The prosecution has to adduce evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Steven Avery is the killer. The theory it offers to the jurors is just to assist them in making sense of the evidence, i.e. the facts. The jurors are free to completely reconstruct and reframe the evidence to fit a different theory, as long as the evidence supports that theory.
So a juror could reasonably say, look, the car was found on Avery's property; he specifically requested (using a false name) that she and no other photographer come to the Avery property to photograph the van; he called her three times that day, twice using Star 67 to hide his identity because he had creeped her out on earlier visits to the Avery property to photograph vehicles, as she had told colleagues; they found a bullet fired from Avery's gun with Halbach's DNA on it in his garage; they found her burned bones in his fire pit; etc. etc. (I won't recite all the evidence). I don't know exactly how it all went down, but the guy's defense is that it's all a conspiracy? So how did it go down?
Without a plausible alternative theory, supported by evidence, any alleged conspiracy would be too elaborate to be plausible.
(Some of the above evidence isn't in the documentary. After reading this
about how the show is biased, I started reading this rebuttal website:
http://www.newstalk1130.com/onair/c...7717/rebutting-a-murderer-episode-1-14260554/
The rebuttal website is equally biased, but having the view of both sides is helpful.)
Just to be clear, when I say "I" above, I am not saying that I, Emcee, personally subscribe to the view I've described. I just want to say that I do think that a juror would be entitled to reach that conclusion. Like, if I were an appellate court judge and Avery's lawyer on appeal raised a sufficiency of the evidence argument, the conviction would stand. (Avery's best shot is working on his constitutional issues/prosecutorial and police misconduct arguments, although he doesn't have a lot of proof, that I've seen, that would really invalidate the conviction in a post-conviction hearing.)
For me the real value of shows like Making a Murderer and Serial is not to prove a particular person's innocence. I don't think a preponderance of the evidence shows that either Steven Avery (same disclaimer, not done with the show yet) or Adnan Syed is innocent. But, especially with Syed, there was no way there was proof beyond a reasonable doubt at trial. And now, there is not much we can do about it. Our system is, you get one shot to defend yourself by introducing evidence at trial. If you don't succeed, the record is closed, and you are stuck with that record unless there is some newly discovered evidence you couldn't reasonably have found at the time. That's pretty harsh, really. One chance, or you lose a lifetime of freedom.
