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Making a murderer (spoilers)

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KI4MVP

formerly LJ4MVP
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I just watched the second half of this with my wife. The second trial is the most bizzare thing I ever saw. The evidence from one the first trial shows the second trial couldn't possibly be right. I don't understand it at all. In the first trial the Prosecuter said she was killed in the garage with a gun, in the second trial they convicted the boy for the coerced confession of killing her in the bedroom with a knife.
 
I watched this last week, wow what a series. I'd love to hear a lawyers take on the proceedings but IMO the evidence was questionable at best. Whether or not he did it, the evidence presented was filled with reasonable doubt. It was simply amazing to watch both trials.
 
I don't necessarily think Avery was innocent, and he's certainly not a model citizen, but the investigation and trial were both a complete sham.

Manitowoc County railroaded Avery once before. It's not out of the realm of possibility they did it again.
 
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I'm not sure about Steven, and the show certainly didn't show the whole trial and I didn't see all of what they did show. But what happened to his nephew was outrageous. The Prosecuter closed the first trial by saying there was no blood in the bedroom because she wasn't killed in the bedroom, she was shot in the garage. Then he opens the second trial saying she was stabbed in the bedroom. They already knew this wasn't true yet used it to convict him.

The nephews first lawyer should be disbarred and the investigator who was supposed to be working for the defense should go to jail. I don't know if there is actually a law, but the two of them conspired against the person they were supposed to represent. From what I saw I don't believe the nephew was involved. I think he was manipulated into sawing what they wanted him to because they took advantage of his low intelligence, a 16 year old who was still on a 4th grade level.

His second lawyer wasn't very good either.
 
Deplorable conduct by the prosecution. They absolutely went to the public early to help get a guilty verdict. I'm not sure if Avery is innocent, but I certainly don't think there was anything presented that provided proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

It'd have been a whole lot easier for me to condemn this guy without seeing this series. Made me reflect on how I catch myself "judging a book by it's cover" at times. Hard not to do that, but I feel like the show has helped me gain some more self awareness for the next time I start to judge someone quickly.
 
The Mirage of Justice

If you are poor, you will almost never go to trial—instead you will be forced to accept a plea deal offered by government prosecutors. If you are poor, the word of the police, who are not averse to fabricating or tampering with evidence, manipulating witnesses and planting guns or drugs, will be accepted in a courtroom as if it was the word of God. If you are poor, and especially if you are of color, almost anyone who can verify your innocence will have a police record of some kind and thereby will be invalidated as a witness. If you are poor, you will be railroaded in an assembly-line production, from a town or city where there are no jobs, through the police stations, county jails and courts directly into prison. And if you are poor, because you don’t have money for adequate legal defense, you will serve sentences that are decades longer than those for equivalent crimes anywhere else in the industrialized world.

If you are a poor person of color in America you understand this with a visceral fear. You have no chance. Being poor has become a crime. And this makes mass incarceration the most pressing civil rights issue of our era.

The 10-part online documentary “Making a Murderer,” by writer-directors Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, chronicles the endemic corruption of the judicial system. The film focuses on the case of Steven Avery and his nephew, Brendan Dassey, who were given life sentences for murder without any tangible evidence linking them to the crime. As admirable as the documentary was, however, it focused on a case where the main defendant, Avery, had competent defense. He was also white. The blatant corruption of, and probable conspiracy by, the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office in Wisconsin and then-Calumet County District Attorney Ken Kratz is nothing compared with what goes on in the well-oiled and deeply cynical system in place in inner-city courts. The accused in poor urban centers are lined up daily like sheep in a chute and shipped to prison with a startling alacrity. The attempts by those who put Avery and Dassey behind bars to vilify them further after the release of the film misses the point: The two men, like most of the rest of the poor behind bars in the United States, did not receive a fair trial. Whether they did or did not murder Teresa Halbach—and the film makes a strong case that they did not—is a moot point.

Once you are charged in America, whether you did the crime or not, you are almost always found guilty. Because of this, as many activists have discovered, the courts already are being used as a fundamental weapon of repression, and this abuse will explode in size should there be widespread unrest and dissent. Our civil liberties have been transformed into privileges—what Matt Taibbi in “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap” calls “conditional rights and conditional citizenship”—that are, especially in poor communities, routinely revoked. Once rights become privileges, none of us are safe.

In any totalitarian society, including an American society ruled by its own species of inverted totalitarianism, the state invests tremendous amounts of energy into making the judicial system appear as if it functions impartially. And the harsher the totalitarian system becomes, the more effort it puts into disclaiming its identity. The Nazis, as did the Soviet Union under Stalin, broke the accused down in grueling and psychologically crippling interrogations—much the same way the hapless and confused Dassey is manipulated and lied to by interrogators in the film—to make them sign false confessions. Totalitarian states need the facade of justice to keep the public passive.

The Guardian newspaper reported: “The Innocence Project has kept detailed records on the 337 cases across the [United States] where prisoners have been exonerated as a result of DNA testing since 1989. The group’s researchers found that false confessions were made in 28 percent of all the DNA-related exonerations, a striking proportion in itself. But when you look only at homicide convictions—by definition the most serious cases—false confessions are the leading cause of miscarriages of justice, accounting for a full 63% of the 113 exonerations.”

“[T]he interrogator-butcher isn’t interested in logic,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes in “The Gulag Archipelago,” “he just wants to catch two or three phrases. He knows what he wants. And as for us—we are totally unprepared for anything. From childhood on we are educated and trained—for our own profession; for our civil duties; for military service; to take care of our bodily needs; to behave well; even to appreciate beauty (well, this last not really all that much!). But neither our education, nor our upbringing, nor our experience prepares us in the slightest for the greatest trial of our lives: being arrested for nothing and interrogated about nothing.”

If the illusion of justice is shattered, the credibility and viability of the state are jeopardized. The spectacle of court, its solemnity and stately courthouses, its legal rituals and language, is part of the theater. The press, as was seen in the film, serves as an echo machine for the state, condemning the accused before he or she begins trial. Television shows and movies about crime investigators and the hunt for killers and terrorists feed the fictitious narrative. The reality is that almost no one who is imprisoned in America has gotten a trial. There is rarely an impartial investigation. A staggering 97 percent of all federal cases and 95 percent of all state felony cases are resolved through plea bargaining. Of the 2.2 million people we have incarcerated at the moment—25 percent of the world’s prison population—2 million never had a trial. And significant percentages of them are innocent.

Judge Jed S. Rakoff in an article in The New York Review of Books titled “Why Innocent People Plead Guilty” explains how this secretive plea system works to thwart justice. Close to 40 percent of those eventually exonerated of their crimes originally pleaded guilty, usually in an effort to reduce charges that would have resulted in much longer prison sentences if the cases had gone to trial. The students I teach in prison who have the longest sentences are usually the ones who demanded a trial. Many of them went to trial because they did not commit the crime. But if you go to trial you cannot bargain away any of the charges against you in exchange for a shorter sentence. The public defender—who spends no more than a few minutes reviewing the case and has neither the time nor the inclination to do the work required by a trial—uses the prospect of the harshest sentence possible to frighten the client into taking a plea deal. And, as depicted in “Making a Murderer,” prosecutors and defense attorneys often work as a tag team to force the accused to plead guilty. If all of the accused went to trial, the judicial system, which is designed around plea agreements, would collapse. And this is why trial sentences are horrific. It is why public attorneys routinely urge their clients to accept a plea arrangement. Trials are a flashing red light to the accused: DO NOT DO THIS. It is the inversion of justice.

The wrongly accused and their families, as long as the fiction of justice is maintained, vainly seek redress. They file appeal after appeal. Those convicted devote hundreds of hours of study in the law library in prison. They believe there has been a “mistake.” They think that if they are patient the “mistake” will be rectified. Playing upon such gullibility, authorities allowed prisoners in Stalin’s gulags to write petitions twice a month to officials to proclaim their innocence or decry mistreatment. Those who do not understand the American system, who are not mentally prepared for its cruelty and violence, are largely helpless before authorities intoxicated with the godlike power to destroy lives. These authorities advance themselves or their agendas—Joe Biden when he was in the Senate and Bill Clinton when he was president did this—by being “tough” concerning law and order and national security. Those who administer the legal system wield power largely in secret. They are accountable to no one. Every once in a while—this happened even under the Nazis and Stalin—someone will be exonerated to maintain the fiction that the state is capable of rectifying its “mistakes.” But the longer the system remains in place, the longer the legal process is shrouded from public view, the more the crime by the state accelerates.

The power elites—our corporate rulers and the security and surveillance apparatus—rewrite laws to make their criminal behavior “legal.” It is a two-tiered system. One set of laws for us. Another set of laws for them. Wall Street’s fraud and looting of the U.S. Treasury, the obliteration of our privacy, the ability of the government to assassinate U.S. citizens, the revoking of habeas corpus, the neutralizing of our Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures, the murder of unarmed people in the streets of our cities by militarized police, the use of torture, the criminalizing of dissent, the collapse of our court system, the waging of pre-emptive war are rendered “legal.” Politicians, legislators, lawyers and law enforcement officials, who understand that leniency and justice are damaging to their careers, and whom Karl Marx called the “leeches on the capitalist structure,” have constructed for their corporate masters our system of inverted totalitarianism. They serve this system. They seek to advance within it. They do not blink at the victims destroyed by it. And most of them know it is a sham.

“We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others,” Solzhenitsyn warned. “In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”


http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_mirage_of_justice_20160117
 
Oh I agree. I have never scene a prosecutor so bias in an attempt to convict someone. I think it is insane the power the Judge and prosecutor has to convict someone, especially in a small town with little check and balances. I do not think he is convicted if this is in a larger city. I also think it was odd some of the stuff the Judge would not allow into the trial. The prosecutor got to basically convicted him before the trial started in the media. The press conference on the nephew was such a sham. I just dont see how you could convicted.
 
I just watched the second half of this with my wife. The second trial is the most bizzare thing I ever saw. The evidence from one the first trial shows the second trial couldn't possibly be right. I don't understand it at all. In the first trial the Prosecuter said she was killed in the garage with a gun, in the second trial they convicted the boy for the coerced confession of killing her in the bedroom with a knife.
I could never understand how they could have taken that confession seriously. Outside of the crazy way that the confession was acquired (I understand they do this a lot), there is no way they could actually believe his version of the story. If you slit somebody's throat while they are handcuffed to a bed, like he described, I cannot possibly imagine a scenario in which the bed and mattress are still there, but all of the blood is gone. I don't care how much bleach you use, a TON of blood would have been spilled.

Not to mention the complete lack of any signs of abrasion on the bedposts from handcuffs, etc. It's just crazy how they took what is almost a coerced confession that is later recanted with no physical evidence to support it (and indeed, the physical evidence would seem to contradict it) and convict on nothing except that. It's very hard for me to sit here and believe that Dassey did what they claimed he did.
 
I could never understand how they could have taken that confession seriously. Outside of the crazy way that the confession was acquired (I understand they do this a lot), there is no way they could actually believe his version of the story. If you slit somebody's throat while they are handcuffed to a bed, like he described, I cannot possibly imagine a scenario in which the bed and mattress are still there, but all of the blood is gone. I don't care how much bleach you use, a TON of blood would have been spilled.

Doesn't matter. They got what they wanted. The truth is irrelevant.
 
I'm not sure about Steven

He's a pedophile, rapist and murderer...oh, he also likes to cover animals in oil and set them on fire too.

In Dassey's phone calls to his mom, Barb, he told her about how Avery had molested him for years. Before the first time Avery went to prison, a niece had also said he molested her. They made no mention of this in the show.

Teresa Halbach didn't want to go to Avery's house because she said he was creepy and 1st time she went he was only wearing a towel. Avery made two *67 phone calls to Teresa Halbach the day of the murder pretending to be someone else to lure her over. Auto Trader people convinced her to go. During the time they were searching for her, Avery admitted to Nancy Grace on air that she had come over and then left. If that was true, why did he call her at 4:35(not using *67) and leave a message saying - “Hey, how come you never came over? Where are ya?”. They made no mention of this in the show.

Dassey said Halbach was in leg irons and handcuffs. Avery bought leg irons and handcuffs from a place called Intimate Treasures a couple weeks earlier. In a bizarre twist, Dassey's mom was with Avery during the purchase. They made no mention of this in the show.

People need to keep in mind that this isn't a documentary presenting both sides of a story. It's a one-sided biased defense video intended to make him look innocent. That said, no doubt more people should be in jail from Manitowoc...those assholes are pieces of shit. But, Avery is a piece of shit too. He's where he belongs and i hope he's getting raped.
 
@Maximus is right. The documentary is one sided to present a story about how the evidence is tainted. There is some meat on that bone for sure but Avery's guilt/innocence is not the focus of the story.

I have talked to 2 people, 1 guy from Green Bay and another from a surrounding community to Manitowoc. Both were emphatic that he did it and he's a bad dude. They said we saw about 60% of the evidence and another 40% that was pretty damning wasn't even addressed. The documentary also didn't offer up another plausible scenario of how she died or who else could have done it.

The thing I found most disturbing was the kid's confession. That was sad to watch. He didn't know what he was doing, couldn't comprehend the gravity of the situation and just wanted to please these guys who were out for blood.

One thing I didn't understand was how the prosecutor argued successfully in a court of law 2 different versions of the same crime. For Avery he argued that she was killed in the garage by Avery alone while for Dassey he argued she was shackled to Avery's bed in his trailer and had her throat cut there.
 
I could never understand how they could have taken that confession seriously. Outside of the crazy way that the confession was acquired (I understand they do this a lot), there is no way they could actually believe his version of the story. If you slit somebody's throat while they are handcuffed to a bed, like he described, I cannot possibly imagine a scenario in which the bed and mattress are still there, but all of the blood is gone. I don't care how much bleach you use, a TON of blood would have been spilled.

Not to mention the complete lack of any signs of abrasion on the bedposts from handcuffs, etc. It's just crazy how they took what is almost a coerced confession that is later recanted with no physical evidence to support it (and indeed, the physical evidence would seem to contradict it) and convict on nothing except that. It's very hard for me to sit here and believe that Dassey did what they claimed he did.
Just read the transcript of the interview with his first attorney's investigator, which paints a completely different picture. Namely, that they took her into the garage, where they stabbed her and shot her. And that they didn't stab her in the house at all. This is different from his other account, and it is more plausible to me.

I'm still confused by the lack of any physical evidence on the bedposts, but at least it clears up what seemed like an impossible circumstance to me -- to have no remaining DNA on a mattress in which a girl's throat was slashed.

I find the public's reaction to this pretty interesting too. I don't know how you could watch this show and not want to look into the case more, considering how obviously slanted the documentary is. Yet, it's also clear that there is all sorts of shady stuff going on in the criminal justice system, which this serves to highlight. It's not contradictory to think that Avery is 100% guilty and that some of the cops and investigators involved are very untrustworthy and may have done some highly unethical things, both in his previous case and the recent case.
 
He's a pedophile, rapist and murderer...oh, he also likes to cover animals in oil and set them on fire too.

In Dassey's phone calls to his mom, Barb, he told her about how Avery had molested him for years. Before the first time Avery went to prison, a niece had also said he molested her. They made no mention of this in the show.

Teresa Halbach didn't want to go to Avery's house because she said he was creepy and 1st time she went he was only wearing a towel. Avery made two *67 phone calls to Teresa Halbach the day of the murder pretending to be someone else to lure her over. Auto Trader people convinced her to go. During the time they were searching for her, Avery admitted to Nancy Grace on air that she had come over and then left. If that was true, why did he call her at 4:35(not using *67) and leave a message saying - “Hey, how come you never came over? Where are ya?”. They made no mention of this in the show.

Dassey said Halbach was in leg irons and handcuffs. Avery bought leg irons and handcuffs from a place called Intimate Treasures a couple weeks earlier. In a bizarre twist, Dassey's mom was with Avery during the purchase. They made no mention of this in the show.

People need to keep in mind that this isn't a documentary presenting both sides of a story. It's a one-sided biased defense video intended to make him look innocent. That said, no doubt more people should be in jail from Manitowoc...those assholes are pieces of shit. But, Avery is a piece of shit too. He's where he belongs and i hope he's getting raped.

I just wonder where the leg irons and handcuffs were, or where Halbach's DNA or blood were in the room.... Or, where the marks are on the bedposts. You say he bought them, but what does that prove? Is it impossible for Dassey to already know what Steven and Jodi did with that stuff?

Also, I'm just interested... Where's the *67 info from?
 
I just wonder where the leg irons and handcuffs were, or where Halbach's DNA or blood were in the room....

I'm guessing they killed her in the garage like Dassey said in some of the tapes not included in the documentary. Dassey's mom said there were bleach stains all over his pants from a "garage cleanup" over at Avery's. Well shit, i wonder what they were cleaning up. :chuckle:

Or, where the marks are on the bedposts. You say he bought them, but what does that prove?

According to @gourimoko and @The Oi when you buy these things at an intimacy store, they are designed not to damage the furniture you hook them up to bed posts. It doesn't prove anything, but it gives more credibility to Dassey than Avery from my perspective. I mean Avery claims he never saw the girl. Then Dassey claims he sees the missing girl hooked up to handcuffs and legirons....exactly what Avery had just bought???


Is it impossible for Dassey to already know what Steven and Jodi did with that stuff?

Jodi was in jail when they were purchased.


Also, I'm just interested... Where's the *67 info from?

Two people from the phone company testified about it. They said the first 2 calls were *67 calls. The third was 2 hours later when he didnt *67 and when he left the phone message asking why she never showed...I would presume as an attempt to cover his tracks.
 

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